I probably would have got burnt out on racing XC if I kept at it. Every year it got a little more repetitive. The courses got less challenging, I raced the same people all the time, and I was the youngest person in my category. I had another two years in that category and I was already winning, so what was there for me to do? Win and then win again before I can move up? Then my brother quit racing so I was wondering, ‘if the person who I look up to doesn’t like racing then do I want to be doing it?’

Then I got myself a dirt jump bike and found myself riding that more and more. Instead of riding my trail bike I’d ride my dirt jumper down at the skatepark or the jumps. At events I’d be riding my dirt jumper right up until the race started and then I’d put it down, race and then as soon as I finished I be back on the jumper. Then I started getting support for dirt jumping and less for racing so I decided to just follow that and see where it went. I didn’t do it because I want to be pro, I just wanted to have fun.

Cross–country might seem like a funny route to freeriding but how I see it is that I grew up in the mountains riding a bike. This was before I even knew the (Whistler) Bike Park existed, so I’d have to ride up the hill to ride a good trail down. That’s what cross–country racing was all about for me: just riding up hills to race back down. I also learned to ride on pinner race bikes on some of the gnarliest trails in Whistler, so when I got on a downhill bike I thought ‘wow, this isn’t hard. I can go way faster and ride over anything’. I had to learn all those fine steps on the bikes I had growing up. At the beginning stages of riding I didn’t have room for error so I learnt a lot that way.”

“Eventually riding started to get in the way of school and I began to get bad grades…kind of. I’d do fine but there were some teachers that didn’t like me being away so much and they started screwing me over. So I was thinking, ‘this is stupid, I’m working my arse off to get shitty grades, I’m over that’. So I figured I’d just wouldn’t go to school anymore and I started correspondence in grade eight or nine.

Whistler, being such an active town (especially in ski racing) had correspondence school, or what they called ‘Cool School’. It was a bunch of my ski race friends and I. Basically we all had the same work to do as a regular student but we figured it out on our own. It is the same as school. They gave us the same textbooks and work but instead of having a teacher telling us how to do it we had to figure it out ourselves.

It sucked at first. It wasn’t that bad if you could figure it out but then I might get to the next section and I might have no idea how to do it so I would stare at it for hours. Some work that could be done in half hour I might be sat down in front of all day trying to figure it out. There were some teachers we could go see on certain days if we needed to but if I was sat on an airplane flying to a comp trying to figure something out trying to catch up on loads of work it would definitely suck.

I’m quite kinetic with my learning. I like to be right there touching things, figuring it out in the moment. Figuring it out and solving it, not just thinking about it. I liked the challenge of correspondence. I don’t like it when people hand things to me. I like to problem solve for myself. I don’t want people’s help, I just want to do it on my own and do it my way.

Then one day I came to hand in all my work and there was no teacher and the classroom was closed down. I was couldn’t get hold of anyone to ask about it or find out what happened, so basically at that point I didn’t even have time for school anymore so it just ended. I didn’t graduate, I have just four courses to do. Maybe I’ll go back. It wouldn’t take long to do if I went back to do it but right now it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t going to kill me if I stopped doing school. Instead I could progress and improve myself in other ways.

The first day I was on Cool School, the very first day, I went riding because I figured I’d do my work later that day. I turned up at the dirt jumps and there was Andrew Shandro with his kid. That’s when he hooked me up with Trek. Before that I’d got a sponsorship from Nike also while I was on a school day. So there I was getting money and product for my bike so I didn’t have to work to pay for it and I’m not at school. I quickly started to feel like I was learning way more about life through traveling and riding my bike than I ever did at school.”

Andrew Shandro (one of the Godfathers of modern day mountainbiking) remembers that day as clearly as Brandon…>>