With an emotional cocktail of fear, nervousness and excitement brewing in his mind, Hayden Zablotny dropped in.
The 22-year-old Vernon rider had gotten the call to take part in the world’s most dare-devilish mountain biking event, Red Bull Rampage, and after weeks of preparation, it was time to throw down a massive line.
It was a line Zablotny had designed himself and built with a team of trail builders down the rocky outcrops in the desert lands of Virgin, Utah.
“I tried to have, when I was up there, as minimal thoughts as possible,” Zablotny told The Morning Star, recalling the moment he was atop the cliff and about to take on his run.
“If I was thinking, I was just thinking that I was so stoked to finally get the chance to ride my bike at Red Bull Rampage.”
By the time he’d reached the bottom at the Oct. 19 event, he’d secured a score of 96 — the second-highest score in Red Bull Rampage history, behind only fellow Canadian Kurt Sorge’s 96.5 run in 2015, a score that would prove high enough to win the whole event.
Not bad for a Red Bull Rampage rookie.
“It felt pretty surreal. It was quite an unreal feeling that I had worked really hard and really long for,” Zablotny said.
Zablotny said he thinks his line-building is what impressed the judges most. Case in point: his two builders won a trail-building award at the event as well.
Zablotny crashed out on his first of two runs, heaping pressure onto his second and final run. In that second run, he executed his plan to perfection.
His first trick was a flat spin 360 and on the next trickable feature he pulled off a nac nac. He went on to nail a one-foot tabletop, and after that feature he executed a daring flat-drop backflip. What followed was a flat spin 450, a suicide no-hander and, to end the run off, an opposite flat-spin.
If that sounds like a dizzying array of tricks to pull off in just a minute or two, that’s because it is.
And it’s all done at death-defying heights.
A dangerous feat
The danger inherent to Red Bull Rampage is what separates the event from others like it. And that danger was on harrowing display at this year’s Rampage.
Two riders — Adolf Silva and Emil Johansson — both required medical airlifts after suffering two of the more frightening crashes in recent Rampage history. Silva, a Spanish rider, sustained a severe spinal injury, while Sweden’s Johansson suffered a serious dislocation of his right hip.
Zablotny had to contend with those scary crashes messing with his mental game when he took on the ride. He said quelling the fear was a matter of channeling the other emotions at play.
“The fear is definitely real and it’s there. But you kind of have to be excited as well. I think it means, be happy and stoked on what you’re doing in order to cope with the fear and make everything work,” he said.
Zablotny’s mother, Laura Zablotny, was on edge as her son backflipped his way down the steep terrain.
“We were so afraid that he would get injured,” she told The Morning Star at an event celebrating Zablotny’s victory on Nov. 29 at Sun Country Cycle. “It’s one of the most extreme sports with a high number of serious injuries, and this was a bad year.”
Laura said watching her son make calculations in preparation for his run was a balm against fear. Zablotny was ready for the challenge.
It was a challenge unlike any other in Rampage history that he had concocted for himself.
“He still put his life on the line from dropping in off the actual start deck,” Laura said. “No one had ever done that before.”
Zablotny has some ideas regarding safety at Red Bull Rampage.
He explained that in the early days of Rampage, riders were building their runs on blank canvases — that is, they were building on terrain that had never been built on before.
More recent Rampage events have been held in repeat locations, meaning the terrain being used already has features built into it, which new riders have to build around or incorporate into their lines.
“It definitely makes it a little bit different, and I would say trickier, because it doesn’t allow for people to fully unleash their vision,” Zablotny said. “You kind of have to make do with what’s already there and you reuse old things.”
He thinks this reuse of old features can be dangerous, because riders are now using features that others before them had meticulously designed to suit their runs, their abilities, their visions, instead of creating their own from scratch.
“I know that there are a lot of people that were concerned about all the injuries that happened this year, and I think a big factor into that is the venues and just having all these old features there for riders to already have to huck themselves off of, rather than having to create it and visualize what you’re gonna do off of it while you’re creating it,” he said.
“I truly think (new terrain) is what Rampage needs in order for it to really be relevant again and also safe.”
Vernon’s adrenaline family
As it turns out, Zablotny’s heart-pumping choice of sport is something that runs in the family.
His father was a professional BMX racer, and his 17-year-old sister is an F4 and go-kart racer. She’s aspiring to be an F1 driver one day.
“I guess it does run in the family to do adrenaline junky things,” Zablotny said with a slight note of humour in his voice.
Laura admits she doesn’t exactly know where it comes from, aside from dad’s career doing crazy stuff on a bike.
“Both my kids seem to be alive when they’re flying,” she said.
“Everybody who knows Hayden has known that he lives and sleeps and dreams and eats on his bike,” she added.
Zablotny spoke to The Morning Star a few days before Christmas, and two months after his Rampage victory. He politely asked if he could call back in an hour when reached for an interview around 4 p.m. There was still some daylight at that hour, and it’s not like Zablotny to let daylight slip away without spending it on his bike.