Part 2: The Mountain Bike Matrix with Kenney Smith

Skip Navigation
You are viewing this website with either CSS support turned off, or are not using a CSS compliant browser. This will significantly reduce your Colonies.com experience.

Interview with Kenney Smith

By: Nicole Trigg

Photos By: Ian Millar, Skippy Photo, Nicole Trigg

Part Two: The Riding

KENNEY SMITH

How do you mentally approach your riding?
I want to spend every second I get on my bike. Basically I get out of bed and I’m just like what do I have to do today. I have to work, I’ve got to pay bills and stuff and I get to ride bikes. And when is the bike park finally open until 8 o’clock every day o sweet that starts in two weeks. I’ve got 60 days on my bike if not more this year already. I just want to ride every day. I just want to pin it and go as fast as I can with my friends and we push each other pretty hard to go faster. It’s pretty sweet. I want to challenge myself with building really nasty lines that to some people are just ridiculous. But I like challenging myself and building lines that are really high consequence and just such a mental challenge where you know you could ride it but it takes you days and days. You’ve got to build it and building stuff around here means sledgehammers. I try to stay away from ladders. There are so many natural rock features in this whole valley from Vancouver to Pemberton. Some of the lines you can find in the bush are like a rock face and a shelf and all these super natural features and just add a bit of ladder add a bit of dirt and then you can ride a gap it’s just endless really the lines you can find.

How do you classify the different areas that you ride around here?
People think of Vancouver as skinnies and bridges and all these weird ladder features but they have some of the coolest natural terrain around. It’s some of the most technical stuff ever. Vancouver you’ve just got to ride the trail ten times and get some lines going on and get it figured out and learn how to ride those slippery roots and steep rock. It’ll come together after a while but it’s really technical. Then you go ride Squamish and it’s still kind of like Vancouver but a little more flowy. Then Whistler’s like flow and A-line. Then Pemberton comes in and it’s like straight the f**k down hang on get your brakes on! <laughs> Pemberton’s sweet. It’s like you’re surfing. I love Pemby.

How do you know when you’re getting faster if you’re riding with the same group of guys and you’re all progressing?
You’re riding the same trails so much then you hit a corner and a week later you hit that corner again and you drift a little more and you can tell it’s coming together. You get in the matrix - that’s what we called it this spring – we just do 1’s and 0’s. <laughs>

What are you working on to incorporate into your freeriding?
Personally I don’t like practicing tricks all day. It just doesn’t do it for me when you’ve got all these sick mountains sitting here. You can go up that hill and come down at 80km an hour over all kinds of knarly stuff and there are so many lines on a trail and every time I’m on a trail it’s different for me. There are all these lines to jump. I’ve got 5 lines roughly picked out this year. One line is an 80 ft high cliff - it’s pretty much a sheer cliff and has this grass chute coming right down the middle and then it comes out onto this shelf and the shelf is 30 ft down to the flat ground so you could ride down this grass chute and then air off this shelf...I’ve been looking at it for two years.

There are a lot of complaints out there that a lot of riders just go and ride the trails then leave and don’t put in the time to build them or even take care of them.
A lot of people don’t know how to build stuff but it’d be cool if everyone came and helped dig - why not? You should want to I think in a sense. I’ll go dig with my friends all the time, like let’s fix that up then it’s good for the next month or two. I don’t really get bitter about people not digging or anything. People get busy right? Who has time to dig? Most people have got to work 40 hours a week and when they get time off they don’t want to go pick up a shovel they want to right their bike right?

How do you see mountain biking changing 5 years from now?
I’m hoping in 5 years mountain biking really goes back to big mountain stees. Like big airs, sick tech lines that are really challenging to ride. That’s what I’m really into, what I’ve always been into, building those super sick jumps and those crazy ass rock faces and big drops. If slopestyle got accepted into the X Games or something like that it would be unreal for mountain biking. Financially mountain bikers would be dialed. Moto guys are driving around in their own jets. They’re good athletes but mountain bikers are sick athletes too. McCaul and all those guys are flipping 20 foot drops which is insane.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A mountain biker. I wanted to be an airplane pilot when I was really young then in high school I wanted to own a bike shop then by the end I just wanted to ride bikes. I think I’m doing that.