Sam Pilgrim by Ale Di Lullo

CamMcCaul Backflip by Dennis Katinas

Amir Kabbani at WhiteStyle 2010 by AleDiLullo

Sam Pilgrim on Podium by Dennis Katinas

More than2,000 spectators made their way to the White Style course in Leongang, Austria designed and built by Kona Clump team rider Grant “Chopper” Fielder. Grant received lots of props from the other riders for the set up consisting of different elements like: An igloo at the start with a small drop, a set of two doubles, followed by two massive fruit bowls combinations (with a 15ft. drop) as well as a huge double at the finish (about 40ft. far). Riders jumped the last gap and reached up to 25ft. above the ground. The most important point to remember: the whole course was built out of snow. So it was definitely a challenging set up. But some of the world’s best riders came to Leogang. They impressed the spectators and sometimes each other by pulling off the biggest tricks that were seen in a mountain bike contest. The riders seemed to feel already quite comfortable in the first training session on Thursday, and even more on Friday. Some of them even changed from their small travel full suspension bikes to hardtails – a proof for a smooth course, even though there was so much airtime involved.

The qualifications on Friday evening were dominated by Swedish rider Martin Soederstroem (technical and clean riding including double tailwhips), Yannick Granieri from France (by far the biggest backflips performed on a contest), U.S. American and TSG rider Cam McCaul (great style and big bag of tricks), Canadian Darren “The Claw” Berrecloth (360 look downs at its best). Linus Sjoeholm (SWE), TSG’s Amir Kabbani (GER) and Sam Pilgrim (GBR) and Jamie Goldman (USA) completed the Top 8 of the qualifyings. But qualifications and finals are always a different kettle of fish:

Martin Soederstroem, who won the qualifications, couldn’t finish his first run because of a technical issue. Then he crashed pretty hard on his second final run trying to pull a double tailwhip because he overshot the 40ft. gap and landed to far down – 11th place for him. Cam McCaul and Amir Kabbani showed clean runs including backflip tailwhips, super seaters, opposite 360s, 360 x-ups and backflips. But it was France, Sweden and Great Britain to dominate the podium: Yannick Granieri managed to be the highest one in Leogang’s sky with huge 360s, backflips and tailwhips in his first run. But he over rotated 360 tailwhip drop in the second run and missed the following jumps. He ended up third. Linus Sjoeholm was the big surprise of the contest. His clean execution and range of technical tricks impressed the judges and spectators. Linus’ second place and 1,000 Euros were well deserved!

The man of the day was TSG rider Sam Pilgrim, no question: tailwhip at the start, frontflip at the first double, backflip no hander at the second, 360 x-up out of the fruit bowl, tuck nohander and backflip at the 2nd fruit bowl, as well as a backflip table at the last jump. Sam couldn’t stop joking after his success having 1,800 Euros in his pocket: “I will spend all the money for sweets, for real!” But he also stated pretty serious: “Crashing on snow is not that funny, because it’s much harder than you might think. It took me a bit to cope with it when I competed the first time at the White Style, but man, it was fun this year and Chopper did a really great job, big respect!”

Results:
1. Sam Pilgrim
2. Linus Sjöholm
3. Yannick Granieri
4. Amir Kabbani
5. Darren Berrecloth
6. Cameron McCaul
7. Jamie Goldman
8. Sam Reynolds
9. Grant Fielder
10. Niki Leitner
11. Martin Söderström
12. Jakub Vencl

For all of you that didn’t make it to Leogang last weekend:
A 24 minutes event report will be aired soon in the Red Bull TV window on Servus TV: March 6th at 11:30 pm CET.
You can watch it with your digital satellite receiver or on March 6th at 11:30 pm CET also live online at www.servustv.com (click “Servus TV Live” link on the bottom left hand corner for the stream).