I’ve been away in France recently covering The Definitive All-Mountain Bike Race, the Mavic Trans-Provence. 350km, seven days, 10,000m ascending, 15,000 descending, 26 special stages. These are the stats that count but which don’t capture all the colour and character of the event. The above shot is by Sven Martin and was taken on day…
The latest issue of MBUK has a photo collection of Central Otago riding photographs taken by the immensely talented Camilla Stoddart. I was asked to supply has words to accompany the piece and I’m glad they made me keep it short and sweet because it gives much more space for Camilla’s amazing photography. Camilla has…
It is a long standing tradition that for each issue of Bike Magazine a framed copy of the cover is sent to the featured rider and photographer. Bike Magazine decided to hand deliver a framed 2012 Photo Annual cover to Sterling Lorence’s home in Vancouver, BC. Sterling Lorence has had more Bike Magazine covers than…
The above image of @amarcoux reading the one existing copy of the June issue of Bike Magazine was tweeted by @morga_deth. On the cover you might be able to read the words ‘NEW ZEALAND’ and if you had Adrian’s view you might be able to read that the chap on the cover is me. The…
Recently, I have been approached by a lot of people that want to know how to get into writing within the mountain bike media. I’m always really happy to hear more people want to be creative and I try to be as honest and open about how they should approach it. However, I realized there…
Last week was the Charlie’s Angels race in Whistler. 250 women, two days of racing (DH first day then XC the next), a spa night, and a 70s disco. All the ingredients for a good time, but there always needs to be a little bit extra. The picture above is of two of the volunteer…
While at the Sea Otter Classic I decided to get to the bottom of a few things. Sure, there was racing to report, products to leer over, babies to shake and hands to kiss, but something deeper has been nagging at us. I want to be better. I want to do the best I can…
Despite injury and busy schedules, we have managed to pump out episode two of Hey Coach. Of course, because of the injuries and hectic summer schedule, Darren Butler and I have had to hand over the presenting reigns to Mason Mashon and Ken Doraty. For a long time it looked like we wouldn’t get another…
It happened at long last. I rode singletrack. Eleven weeks may not seem that long, but if you think that the whole of May, June and most of July was spent missing out on all the days riding and funning that could be had then it might start to feel longer. But trust me, it…
I haven’t taken photos for many years. Even when I did take a lot of photos I couldn’t profess to being very good; I just like documenting the rare moments where my creativity and eye intercepted beautiful scenes or good lighting or just plain luck. Recently I have been carrying my camera around with me…
My video editing learning curve feels like a very steep climb at the moment. However, it is only by exercising that we can strengthen ourselves. Last week I visited Paddy Kaye, the man responsible for building the Joyride Crankworx slopestyle course in Whistler. While he walked me through this years course I hobbled around and…
The July issue of Bike Magazine is out and has a short piece about Will Craig that I wrote in it. Will Craig isn’t your average mountain biker. He rides with a prosthetic arm. More so, he rides perhaps some of the most technical and demanding trails in the world. Hence why he was an…
The summer issue of Coast Mountain Culture has a short piece I wrote about the Coastal Crew. Coast Mountain Culture Magazine is an international-calibre biannual publication dedicated to the exploration and celebration of mountain culture as it exists throughout the vast coastal mountain ranges of western North America. I am incredibly proud and honoured to…
A copy of Revolution issue 27 just dropped through my letterbox. In it there is plenty of rad Australian-centric content and a few bits of my own work. I penned a piece about Australian riders in Whistler called ‘Aussie’s Rule’ Editor Jonathon Taylor asked me to broach the subject of 29ers as Revolution had been…
Here’s the commentary piece I wrote for NSMB.com for last weekend’s UCI World Cup downhill race in Fort William. Read it on NSMB.com HERE. Big Bill’s Mind Games I don’t know how those racers do it. I don’t mean covering ground as fast as they do; that’s pretty obvious how they do that: a totally…
This is a super secret post because this video doesn’t go live till next week. So don’t tell anyone about it. Who Are They? is a look behind the scenes at the people who make the Whistler Bike Park possible. In the first episode we hang out with the trail crew for a morning to…
Thinking you know it all or know everything that people are thinking is an easy trap to fall into. Whistler Bike Park is the most media saturated mountain bike destination. Or so you would think. With this simple weekly video series, that appears on NSMB.com, I step into the Bike Park lift line and ask…
I grew up with Dirt Magazine from issue one and it pretty much formed who I am. I moved from XC racing to DH and hucking because of the messages I read in Dirt. I stopped “training” and pounding creatine shakes and instead started wearing full-face and baggys when I saw the fun and excitement…
My left foot While out riding a trail freshly released from its snow-devil prison in Whistler, I sustained an injury that would throw my whole year into a flat spin. I was clearing a fallen tree off the trail when the tree fell onto my legs and folded my left foot underneath. I felt my…
World Affairs Part 9 The singletrack riders guide to the galaxy…or maybe just some parts of New Zealand PART TWO. So Last week I feebly attempted to cover the best of the south of the South Island singletracks. Somewhat akin to choosing your favorite ice cream flavor when you are confronted by more flavors than…
World Affairs The singletrack riders guide to the galaxy…or maybe just some parts of New Zealand. I am besotted with New Zealand. I have been coming here for a whole bunch of years to escape from the perils of winter (it’s on the other half of the world innit) and each year I love this…
World Affairs: Map Over The Territory I am a sieve. Pour things into me and all those things just stream out like a crowd at a surprise Charlie Sheen appearance. As fast as I pour things in they just keep flowing away down the brain drain. Of course, I am talking about my mind and…
You can not fight time and finally we have time to start playing with Final Cut Pro. We have been playing with video creation and content for a while now but this is our first attempt at editing, and, WOW, it is going to take time to get to the level we want. However, we…
The third installment of Hey Neighbour dropped this week. In this episode our guide for some North Shore history was Sterling Lorence, one of mountain biking’s most respected photographers. Enjoy the video and words which accompanied it. For the full piece, including Sterling’s incredible shots, go to NSMB.com. Hey Neighbour #3: Sterling Lorence’s One Roll…
Mexico was probably the best time of my life. Hidden in the desert, building trails for three months, completely cut off from life and reality (well, we did have internet thank goodness) we were able to shed some of the layers of behavior we are forced to wear in society. We acted like hooligans, roamed…
Laughing is important. Laughing at yourself is even more important. Dan Barham, Matt Dennison and I laugh at ourselves more than most…a statement which sounds like I’m saying something else entirely. Anyway, the Ultramontane series was one of the boldest and most refreshing pieces of branding and creativity that mountain biking has ever seen. Ideal…
We said we may never do it but we did – Hey Coach! Light hearted, highly visual and easy to digest with simple, small pointers, Hey Coach! is a brand new video coaching series that NSMB.com produced in collaboration with Endless Biking. May the 4th be with you.
From Joseph Pulitzer’s credo in the first issue of the New World in 1983: “There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic – dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that…
The latest issue of Spoke Magazine (#46) is available right now. In it there is a story about Switzerland (mainly the Zermatt and Verbier “zones”) that I penned and Mattias Fredriksson shot photos for. You can get hold of a digital copy of the magzine HERE or get a real life, inky smelling piece of relaxation…
As 1st May marks the start of biking season for 2FLAT we thought we would post a few quick and easy Instagram images taken of or around the North Shore of Vancouver over the past winter.
Recently, 2FLAT partnered up with snappy dresser and photographic craftsman Dan Barham, to produce a promotional video for BC based Enduro race team The Nomads. Dan has been experimenting with video lately and I’ve had more than a passing interest in it, so when I started working on a written story about The Nomads for NSMB.com it…
Around the same time Grant Robinson and I traveled through the UK and visited Orange Bikes (story somewhere in this here webber), we also stopped off at Hope Technology to see what happens in a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere. What we found was, frankly speaking, bloody extraordinary. High tech, forward thinking…
On Friday NSMB.com published Wheel Wars I, a brief overview of some of the new wheel size offerings, prototypes, products and perspectives on the practical implications of an ever-expanding wheel size catalogue. On Thursday we followed up with Cosmic Compromises: Is 650b Just Right or is it All Wrong? — Rumors and speculation have abound…
Bikes change colors and styles, go from no suspension to full suspension and everything in between; from single crown to triple clamp, from 1” of travel to 10”, from single-speed to 28 speed. What doesn’t change is the racer who gets on the bike and gives it 100 percent every single time whilst constantly dealing…
What else are you meant to do when Bike Magazine’s editor shoves a microphone in your hand (the one without a beer in it) and tells you to fill 30 seconds of camera time? Being in California makes you do weird things.
“…The menace is loose again, the Hell’s Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the centre stripe, missing by inches…like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with fiery anus, flat…
“The difference is pace. You’ve got to move a newspaper story at a breakneck pace since the reader is only going to be with you for five minutes. A magazine story has to make the reader want to commit more time. If you get a magazine reader to commit to only five minutes you’ve failed.…
“Another metaphor for the problem of celebrity journalism is flash photography. All flash photographs are bad. The flash from the camera distorts the photo. And all flash photographs are the same: everybody’s skin looks the same. And everybody has those same little red dots in their eyes. Celebritydom distorts and obscures whatever might be interesting…
Warning: this isn’t my usual sexual innuendo laced, fart gag blithering tripe. I originally wrote it for NSMB.com and was received very poorly. I wanted to express the beautiful pain I experience when in the mountains and figured other people may feel the same. However, it was universally shot down as overly verbose and too…
This post might seem a little self-indulgent but it is meant to highlight how a bike can take you to so many different places and can be ridden anywhere…as well as be a massive self-love reach-around to completion. These are some of my personal favorite shots of all time. They might not be the ones…
World Affairs: The UK – You can never truly go home. I once had a friend called Rob Bartrip who was a legendary lady slayer. He may have exaggerated once or twice but he did pretty well and he racked up many more notches on his bedpost than his mother would care to know about.…
The Two Worlds Bikes have taught me a lot. Like a wizened old history teacher that I could sit and listen to forever or a bespectacled gym instructor who admonishes me for not doing enough laps, bikes have given me an education that can’t be learnt by book or exam. One of the most biggest…
Today is a good day. Today 2FLAT can unveil the brand new logo and brand mark. The logos, brandmark and wordmark were designed by Tall Tree Creative. I couldn’t be happier to have a good looking flag to wave now. Expect 2Flat stickers, t-shirts, pens, cigarette lighters, soap, teddy bears, underwear, coffee mugs and other…
Back in March, filmer Matt Dennison and I set out to make a humorous video about the Coastal Crew’s new secret sponsor, Specialized Bikes. In order to get the story out but hide their identity we came up with the concept of making a spoof commercial with fictional energy water, Brown Pow. Oh, and it…
In March, Seb Kemp headed to Sedona, AZ to help with the promotion of several new Santa Cruz bicycles. As well as assisting select media from around the world (quite the roll reversal), getting up early and staying up late to shoot photos, he also rode for the lens of Gary “Flipper” Perkin who was…
This story came from issue 106 of Dirt Magazine. Photographer Grant Robinson (grantrobinson.com) and writer Seb Kemp visited the headquarters of Sombrio Clothing in North Vancouver to try and understand what makes Sombrio so different. Founder/owner/CEO/former-pro-hucker/mad-scientist Dave Watson sat down and we picked his brain on the why, where and how of Sombrio and the…
More often than not, the stories that can really fire up the creative juices of a writer are not the ones that will actually make it into print. A writer can have a great idea or story but for some reason or another it doesn’t end up going anywhere. Perhaps the writer is just a…
Last summer Grant Robinson and Seb Kemp toured the UK trying to track down the remnants of domestic mountain bike production. Along the way they stopped in at Orange Bikes to find out how a dirty little family run sheet metal business nearly once took over the world and what is the future in a…
2FLAT was extremely honored to be approached by The Ride Journal to provide some words for their latest issue. Editor Phil Diprose wanted a story about the North Shore trails to accompany some photos by Dan Barham. The photos were of old and decrepit wood stunts – dinosaurs as it were – and it was…
As well as the short essay, Peak Travel, we “blogged” about the other day, 2FLAT’s Seb Kemp also has a story about Nepal in the latest issue of Spoke Magazine. Except it isn’t the usual travel story or adventure tale, but rather a musing on our modern world in a time of global homogeneity, credit…
2FLAT 