White Style 2011 - Sam Pilgrim Wins Again!
More than 2000 spectators made their way to the White Style course, which was designed and built by Kona Clump team rider Grant 'Chopper' Fielder. Grant got a lot of good feedback from the other riders for the set up that included an igloo at the start, 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. lip to lip). Everything was made out of snow so it was a challenging set up, but some of the world’s best impressed the spectators and each other by pulling off big tricks. After the first training session on Thursday some riders swapped their small travel full suspension bikes to hardtails – confirmation that despite its size the course was smooth. The qualifications on Friday evening were dominated by Swedish rider Martin Söderström, with technical and clean riding as well as double tailwhips, Yannick Granieri from France who brought huge backflips, American Cam McCaul (great style and big bag of tricks), Canadian Darren Berrecloth (360 look downs). Linus Sjoeholm (SWE), Amir Kabbani (GER), Sam Pilgrim (GBR) and Jamie Goldman (USA) rounded out the top 8 qualifiers. Finals are of course always a new ball game.
Yannick Granieri showed his ups with huge 360s, backflips and tailwhips in his first run. He might have taken home the title if he had landed his 360 tailwhip drop in his second run. Instead he over-rotated and missed the next jump. Third is still a good result for him and a good start for 2010 on his new bike! Linus Sjoeholm, Martin Söderström's best riding buddy, was the big surprise of the contest. His clean execution and range of technical tricks impressed the judges and spectators. He began with a 360 off the start drop, a double tailwhip at the first double, superman at the second jump, backflip off the fruit bowl, barspin into the 2nd fruit bowl, tailwhip at the big drop and he finished his run with a flipwhip at the last double. Linus’ second place and 1,000 Euros were well deserved! The man of the day was 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 on sweets, for real!” But then he got 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!”
White Style Final Results: 1 Sam Pilgrim Diamondback GBR
2 Linus Sjöholm Scott SWE
3 Yannick Granieri Commencal FRA
4 Amir Kabbani Mongoose GER
5 Darren Berrecloth Specialized CAN
6 Cameron McCaul Trek USA
7 Jamie Goldman Santa Cruz USA
8 Sam Reynolds DMR GBR
9 Grant Fielder Kona GBR
10 Niki Leitner YT Industries AUT
11 Martin Söderström NS Bikes SWE
12 Jakub Vencl AGang CZE
