I recently pulled the dusty old hypewriter from the back of the closet, where it was languishing in semi-retirement, to crank out some verbiage for service as boilerplate and taglines for a somewhat large and kickass mountain bike festival known as the Kokanee Crankworx. (I thought I’d reformed my ways and sworn off  hyperbole forever, but one sniff of Superbowl-sized festivals and the fingers start twitching…)

As the Globe and Mail reported last August,

More than 100,000 people visited specifically for Crankworx last year, and the seven-year-old festival issues close to 300 media credentials. A 2005 study concluded that Crankworx had a $10-million impact on the local economy and a new study, due this fall, is expected to show massive growth.

On Friday, one professional snowboarder made the grudging admission that Crankworx is now superior to the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival, the 15-year-old winter showcase that caters to Whistler’s traditional customers.

Not to mention that the team the Crankworx braintrust, led by Darren Kinnaird as GM, pulls together, rank as the best in their fields, whether that be the founder of original Slopestyle contest, Joyride’s Paddy Kaye, action sports artist Scott Dickson, PR and social media maven Michelle Leroux, creative director Susan Butler, or athletes like Cam Zink, Darren Berrecloth, Thomas Vanderham, Brandon Semenuk and Mike Montgomery, who provided input into the Red Bull Joyride slopestyle course design. Passion is contagious. It’s hard not to spill a little hype when that much stoke is going around. The countdown begins.

Beg for mercy. Beg for more. Gravity beckons.

During Whistler BC’s 10 day Kokanee Crankworx festival, the dirt-adorned put the revel in the free ride mountain biking revolution, bending physics and blowing minds with their tail-whipping back-flipping hard-charging ways. For the eighth year running, the venues of the Whistler Mountain Bike Park serve as a modern day Colosseum, masterpieces of stunt and trail engineering, forum for the ultimate in gladiator contests and public spectacle. 

In less than a decade, Kokanee Crankworx has become the authoritative free ride festival, a supercharged magnet for the world’s best riders, the definitive domestication of dirt in the service of epic endurance, supreme flow, monster air and gravity-fuelled mountain biking. The best mountain bike athletes in the world know that when gravity beckons, you simply say, yes mistress. I’m coming. So make sure you do.