David Bulmer
Twelve days down, nine still to go. Not that Wes is counting of course. He’s been far too busy teasing us with Insta-bangers of pro riders to worry about days or hours, or even writing an article about his time in Salt Lake City. Instead I’ve been having to type up our conversations and live vicariously through him, whilst I’m sat in a kinda-locked down England.
Let’s just say I wasn’t disappointed to see it rain in SLC on Sunday.
So as a result, here are some quotes from people we may (or may definitely not) have spoken to during the last week in Utah…
“I’ve actually had a great time,” confessed one rider’s girlfriend (who wanted to stay anonymous). “It’s the perfect situation because I’m physically not allowed to go to the stadium. Normally, I’m forced along to the race and I’m bored out of my mind for five hours, but for these races, the other girlfriends and I have been getting smashed in the hotel bar, we’ve been doing karaoke in our rooms, and binge watching 50 Shades of Grey. The only thing we must make sure to do is check out the results before our boyfriends come back. Molly (name changed for privacy) forgot last week and her rider was PISSED!”
“It was weird,” said Brandon, the Delta baggage carrier. “We’ve had a lot of Ogio 9800 bags coming into SLC this last month, but not many have been leaving. Then all of a sudden, one shorter guy is hauling like five of them and he was in a massive hurry, as if he had to leave that minute or he’d be forced to do something he really didn’t want to do.”
Of course, not everyone has been staying in SLC the whole time, with Park City being a popular alternative and that’s where we ran across Joey who worked at the resort bike hire shop. “Normally we either get groups hiring all electric, or all standard bikes. But recently we’ve seen a surge in groups of young dudes on standards, riding with over-the-hill media-looking-types carrying overly priced cameras, and those guys are riding electric. Strange times, dude.”
Once again, we came across Australian Steve-O who is still living the dream, hanging out in SLC, hoping to see… well we’re not really sure what he’s hoping to see. “I’m pretty sure I bumped into the Lawrence brothers this week! One was wearing different coloured left and right shoes, and the other was eating a donut, so I’m assuming it was them. However, by the time I crossed the street, they’d jumped into a fancy limousine… so maybe it wasn’t them. I also got invited to some karaoke in a hotel room, but the race was on so I passed.”
The last guy we came across was a pig farmer and he was talking about a deal he got on a load of soil. “It was Sunday night and this dude approached me, saying he had a bunch of soil he needed to get rid of because it was too wet and they needed dry stuff. Sure, I said. As I was hauling it away he shouted out “watch out for all the title aspirations that are buried here”… which I didn’t really understand, but he gave me a good rate so I wasn’t complaining.”
Main image: Garth Milan/Red Bull Content Pool
