Second left and wow, there it is. Hero house number one. It looks like every other house on the block, except for the muddy 4×4 in the drive. I hope he doesn’t see the sweat patches…Knock, knock. “Eric. Nice to meet you. I need the toilet.” Great intro you dumb dumb…I need the toilet…what were you thinking, work harder next time. ”

Grant, nice to meet you too, thanks for coming. Come in, I’m just finishing up a Skype call, the bathroom is there, I won’t be long.” The walls are covered in photos. Lots of them. Nice family photos in big frames. The ones taken by professional photographers in studios. Big house too and well kept, everything has a place except for a few little people things scattered around, I like houses this way, they feel like homes. I sneak a look out the patio windows and see a desert of a back garden with not a blade of grass, only a child sized pumptrack winding its way around a treehouse and plant pots. Paradise.

Eric walks down the stairs. “Sorry about that, I have to do all my calls to Asia in the morning before they all go to bed. Come through, let’s make a plan”. We sit at the kitchen counter come bar and ‘making a plan’ turns into two hours of talking about everything from BMX racing as a kid, to real estate, to who he thinks has ‘it’ on today’s World Cup, to what he is doing now in the industry. My research for this piece may not have been the cleverest…I did none. I wanted to go with only my perceptions and let reality tell me the story. I always perceived E.C. as loud and punk. He’s neither. I’m surprised by how calm he is and how well informed he is of both the past and present mountain bike scene. His answers are calculated and on the spot, it’s as if I sent my questions ahead of time and he already has the answer. He has deep seated opinions on almost everything that we talk about. Opinions that have obviously been thought about extensively and his time in the industry has gone on to prove many of his ideas correct.

At present Eric is the marketing manager come product designer/tester for Hyper bikes. Hyper was big back in the day of his BMX career and now spreading their wings in the MTB world and with Eric’s opinions feeding directly into the product design the bikes will soon be on the market for you and I to ride. He is very open about his racing career and why he was fast. He doesn’t like drugs and BMX was rife with them for a period. So, he believes, was mountain bikes. We talked about money and he is straight up that the money was big for a time, six–figures big for a number of riders, which is why so many tried their hand at racing. He thinks that Aaron Gwin and Greg Minnaar are the top racers of the generation. We talked about partying and how Peaty and Palmer were the best at it but behind the scenes they may have been training harder than everyone else.

He admits the transition from racing to family life was hard but it’s what he wants. He is proud of his kids, massively proud, and doesn’t want to push them into riding. “They can decide for themselves”, is what he says. He talks to his kids not like a dad but like a friend who has been there before and is trying to help. It’s time to get out and ride.

We load the truck and drive five minutes behind his house and into semi desert. We step out of the truck to scout a couple corners. The sound of gunshots greet us and when bullets start raining into the hillside on our left Eric starts shouting in the hopes they hear us and stop. “Between rednecks with their guns and rattlesnakes this isn’t the safest place in the world.” Sure enough less than a minute later and we’ve come across our first snake. I’ve never seen a rattler but Eric goes into Steve Irwin mode and gets a stick and is straight on it, poking it to make it rattle and trying to get it out of the rocks for a picture. He warns me to never go off the trail without first throwing a few rocks into the scrub and hitting the bushes with a stick otherwise you may come onto one that will put an end to the day and possibly my life.

His riding is still flat out. I notice that he looks at things a lot before he rides them and once he’s on the bike it’s full speed ahead and full commitment. He smokes a few corners and drifts his way over a riser and into a rain gully with sniper accuracy. It’s apparent that Hyper is in good hands with him as chief tester. This is his playground and the next two hours is spent doing a bit more riding but far more snake hunting, at which we are very successful, finding one that turns out to be bigger and closer than I’m comfortable with but Eric gives me a thorough rattle snake history and  safety lesson that I will hopefully remember when it is next needed.

It was one of the best and most informative afternoons I’ve had in a while. Later on we’re back at the house watching his two boys Ethan and Cole tear up the pumptrack whilst wearing their dad’s old race helmets. “There are only a couple I want to keep for myself, otherwise it’s all theirs.” The garage walls are adorned with framed jerseys and medals but they’re covered in dust and have ‘another world’ feel about them. Like walking through a grand estate where famous old paintings and furniture have been under lock and key for years only having just been rediscovered. They seem detached from their owner but deeply engrained at the same time.

E.C.: Yeah, bikes. All my life. I started racing BMX really young, about 8 years old. I grew up in Long Beach and we rode most every day.>>