Vink would finish the race season and ride nothing but BMX for three months, only touching his downhill bike when it was time to start training again. He had dreams of doing things differently but he came up against a rigid industry that refused to see his point of view. He says: “I tried explaining to my team and sponsors that I wanted to create lines and build jumps and they all looked at me like ‘whatever’.” So he took the plunge and retired from racing at the end of 2012.

You would think at the age of 32, with a racing career over, Nico Vink’s future in action sports was behind him, but he had other ideas. He started riding motocross more but it wasn’t long before push bikes started to pull him back. Vink wanted to hit jumps that would traditionally have been suitable for a motocross bike on his downhill bike so, along with Andreu Lacondeguy, Makken, Nick Pescetto, Kurt Sorge and Graham Agassiz, he formed the FEST Series.

The idea was simple, extract the purest essence of <class=”noskimwords”>freeride mountain biking<class=”noskimwords”> by always building new lines and riding massive jumps in optimal conditions. The events are the antithesis to the highly stressful world of competitions, Vink says: “At Rampage when you’re at the top and it’s windy they say, ‘you don’t have to go but the cameras are running and if you don’t go now you probably won’t have your second run’ and that’s a lot of pressure for riding in the scariest conditions you’ve ever done in your life.” Instead the riders at the FEST Series are given a five day window to ride whenever the conditions are at their best. If it’s windy or wet then they will simply wait until they can put together the best performance possible.

Despite the skepticism of the industry, the FEST Series was a huge success. The first event, Aggy’s Reunion was dropped on an unsuspecting public in 2014 and the internet lit up. It has expanded year on year and in 2016 is still going strong with sponsors clamoring to get on board.

Nico’s Loosefest has the biggest jumps of the series with the biggest kicker topping out at 25 metres (the length of two double decker busses) and riders hit them with terrifying speed.  Although there is a loose competitive element to the events, it’s more about producing the best media content possible to appease the sponsors, get the public stoked and have a good time in the process.

The end goal of the week is to have a train of every rider hitting the jumps one after the other to create that “banger” drone shot. Vink likens it to the riding you do as a kid where you and your friends are just pushing each other while having a laugh, he says: “it’s best just follow your friends rather than one person showing how good he is.”

And it’s the kids that have latched on to the FEST Series with the greatest fervor. Even when he walks round the mountain biking mecca of Whistler, Vink hears them talking about what happened at the latest stop and encouraging him to keep going. Vink may modestly claim he’s not trying to push the sport but by redefining what is possible on a mountain bike you can’t help but feel he’s nurturing the next generation of huckers.

The future is unclear for Vink, after all he’s got this far on just doing as he pleases, but his dreams are to build something bigger and better – he now describes the Loosefest line as “basic” and has started to overshoot the first set by five metres. The only thing holding him back from building something bigger is money and time, but he needn’t worry, as Vink himself says: “We’re doing what we want to and people like it, so we manage to keep on doing it and the industry follows.” It may not be long before he’s leaving people speechless with something even scarier than the Loosefest line.