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Ride the Hill's new foam-pit Opener day Alan Newman tells us all about it... After a few months of patiently waiting and a few weeks of frenzied testing, the brand new XBP foam pit was finally ready to open! I got to the centre bright and early on a beautiful sunny day and found Andy, Will and Bob finishing preparations and lugging crates of juice doctor up the hill! Unfortunately it had been raining the night before so the run in was a tad slow and landing in the pit was like a cold shower! Luckily we had Tony around to shake the water off and take the first hit. It was a while until the rest of the guys manned up and followed him in but once everyone had arrived and kitted up practice began! All the foam is close celled so doesn’t retain any water, this meant that after a couple of runs each it was pretty much dry and the warm up was well underway. The riders involved were – Myself, Ryan Roberts, Ieaun Jehu, Will Copsey, Robert Phillips, Lester Shrimpton, Matt Brind, Ben Rye, Theo Ackworth, Frankie ‘Chlamydia’ Adams, Raph La Roche, Rob Dryburgh and a late Pete Hills. After a little bit of riding, some pretty sick tricks were being thrown down including Rodeos, 7’s, Barrel rolls and all sorts of switch wizardry from Brindy. Me and Matt decided to try some double backflips but unfortunately the ground was too wet to get the speed (even with an arm wrenching rope pull-in!). Andy Brind got upside down for the first time (I think) and Raph scared the crap out of everyone by dropping in unaware he had a puncture and not clearing the gap with a front flip attempt!! We had a little Jam afterwards with a £50 cash prize for the best trick which ended up being a 4 way tie between Me (one foot backflip), Ryan (crazy 720 cork things), Ben (smooth method backflip) and Lester (ridiculously stylish 5’s) rather than having the cage fight suggested by Lester we split the cash and moved on to a little jam on the Salmon hip and the Quarter pipe. Theo landed a smooth as silk 30ft boardslide along the long yellow pipe first time, unfortunately Bob didn’t video it and he couldn’t seem to do it again for the camera! Frank tried a couple of FS rodeos over the hip unfortunately he couldn’t quite get it and took a nasty stack on the last try. Ben, Theo and Ieaun were styling it out over the hip and I managed to get some 50-50 stalls on the vert quarter and a FS disaster so was pretty happy. Ryan took the win with a 5-0 to fakie on the vert after working damn hard to get it. After this we went to have a ride on Bobs new box with a £25 cash prize, it was pretty chilled as everyone was knackered from climbing out of the foam all day! Ryan got a lovely 50-50 to BS Stalefish 3 but Will C got the win for effort by getting murderously close to Boardslide 270 outs. It was a great day with loads of the young (and some older) locals being able to ride with us all and get inspired to start spinning and flipping! It was a really fun, chilled out debut for the new Pit. Check out the video of the quarter and hip Jam by Bob on Vimeo here Ride the Hill XBP will be open at the weekends all winter so come down and get some freestyle practice in if the winter free-riding gets boring! See www.ridethehill.com for opening times, prices and more details. Thanks to Alan Newman :) NB. After crediting the photos to Arran, we find they were actually taken by Andy Packer so apologies to Andy & Arran. sorry! Related Shizzle
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