Trick Town

Trick Town

by J. Haynes, Jul 8, 2010

Temecula is a relaxed, peaceful kind of place – not words normally associated with fmx riders – yet half of tonight’s competitors call, it home. this year’s defending champion nate adams explains why the californian city has become Red Bull X-Fighters central.

Look up the town of Temecula on the internet and you’ll get plenty of descriptions of a thriving southern Californian town, a place to which families have flocked in recent years, drawn from nearby San Diego by more affordable housing, wineries, balloon festivals and a more peaceful life. Even the name is suitably blissful, often translated as ‘where the sun breaks through the mist’. In short, it’s a nice place to live – green, quiet, safe. At least on the surface.

There are places in town, though, where it’s not quite like that. Days when the only thing breaking through the mist is an upside-down motorcycle, 10m in the air, the rasping note of its engine scything through the warm air with buzzsaw intensity. Quiet it ain’t.
Safe? Well, if you call flinging yourself up a ramp on a howling bike and then clinging onto the airborne machine with just your fingertips safe, then, yes, this is the most comfortable place in the world. This, then, is Temecula, aka FMX Central, home to, among others, Nate Adams, Robbie Maddison, Andrè Villa and Blake ‘Bilko’ Williams.

What drew the riders here was space. Freedom to carve ramps from the pristine landscape, to rip up back yards and install practice grounds, places where they could hone tricks and then kick back with friends over a few beers and a barbecue. And it’s to here that Nate Adams retreated after winning the 2009 Red Bull X-Fighters title, somewhere to recharge the batteries and ready himself for the assault on 2010.

“The funny thing is that this area is pretty much a Mecca for motocross,” Adams says of his home town.

“The test tracks of all the factories, such as Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki, are about half an hour away, and at the back of my home there’s a mile of prime free-riding. There are also about 10 public tracks about an hour from here – it’s just the place to be.
“When I moved out here, pretty much everyone in freestyle besides Maddo and Bilko lived here, and then I moved here and guys kept coming: Bilko, Andrè Villa, Robbie Maddison, Nicky Danielson have all moved here since I took up residence. One reason is that people want to live where their friends are, so now everybody is here, and that’s just drawing more and more people.”
There is, though, the danger that living in such close proximity to other riders could lead to neighbourly bouts of ‘industrial espionage’, with riders constantly leaning over the garden fence to check out the new tricks being developed by rivals.
“Ha! That’s definitely a possibility, but these days it’s too hard to keep anything a secret anyway,” laughs Adams. “Some days there will be some guys over here riding, and on other days, we will be up at Jimmy Fitzpatrick’s house just 10 minutes up the road – he’s got about 60 acres with unlimited jumps.

“Sometimes you go to ride somewhere and there are two or three people; sometimes you go and there are about 12 people – everybody from (Brian) Deegan to (Jeremy) Stenberg and Robbie Adelberg. It’s just a free-for-all and a real photographer’s dream. That’s what you come out here for – you go to spots like that and there will be a photographer from Racer X or a European mag, and you just go out there and get shots. You would never get that back home in Phoenix, where I’m from. That’s why everyone lives here.”
But it’s not the only reason. Up the road from the back yards of the FMX stars are the factories of many of the major bike manufacturers. A wrecked bike on Monday can usually be back in the foam pits by Friday, thanks to availability of parts and expertise.
“Yeah! All the factories are here,” Adams confirms. “If you order something from Yamaha here, you get it the next day. Robbie (Maddison) moved here partly for that reason. If they haven’t got a part in Australia, then you’ve just got to wait! Here, I can drive an hour up to the factory and get it myself or have it shipped and it arrives the next day. We could go on for hours talking about the advantages of living here!”
The rewards, though, are temporary, fitted around a punishing schedule of events across the globe, chief of which, of course, is the Red Bull X-Fighters World Tour, a series won by Adams last year in a final round showdown at London’s iconic Battersea Power Station. On the night, any one of a quartet of riders could have taken the title. In the end it was Adams who handled the pressure best.

“By the time it got down to the final run, it was between me and Levi – and Levi wasn’t in contention for the overall title – but I still really wanted to win the event. I’d made quite a few mistakes on my previous run, but then I got lucky because Levi repeated a trick and made some mistakes too. I got the feeling that the pressure was off as far as the overall title was concerned. I guess the pressure did get to me, but only after I had actually won the overall title – I won it before the event was over and still had to go out and ride. It was a strange feeling, but luckily I pulled it off.”

And how. After missing out on the Mexico round last year and placing fifth in round two in Canada, Adams suddenly got his mojo back and blitzed the competition in Texas in round three to take maximum points.
Others though were setting the pace, with Mr Consistency, Eigo Sato, scoring in all rounds to hold the series lead. Adams, though, was on fire and in Madrid, second place gave him the series lead. In London, he wrapped it all up in style with an impressive event win. The rise in form throughout the year was no surprise to the American rider, though.
“I think that sometimes, you just want it bad enough,” he says. “Other times, you want it bad enough and things don’t work out, but last year, I wanted it bad enough and I prepared well, so some things just fell into place. I guess I got a little lucky, too, but I believe you make your own luck." Following the London win, Adams took a deserved break – “I took two weeks off. I didn’t touch a dirt bike; in fact, I did anything but touch a dirt bike!” – but thereafter, training for the new year began in earnest, despite the fact his training was hampered by injury and the champion goes into the opening round of 2010 without as much prep as he’d like.
“I’ve just recovered from a broken thumb I suffered in Supercross,” he explains. “I’ve definitely got my work cut out before I tackle Mexico – I’ll wait until my thumb is healed and then just buckle down.”
Despite the setbacks, Adam’s isn’t worried about what his rivals will bring to the Tour’s opening round, choosing instead to focus on enjoying what he does aboard a bike.

“One thing I have never really gone in for is checking out what other people are getting up to – I just go out and do my own thing,” he says. “To go out of your way to try to find out what someone else is getting up to, kind of takes the fun out of it for me.”
And in Mexico this weekend, Adams will be hoping to show his fellow competitors just how potent that mix of fun and focus can be.
“If I show up and someone has done more work and been more creative and beats me, then that’s fine,” he says, before taking one more glance around his Temecula back yard.
“You know, I’m not going to go around peeking over fences, but I can stand on my driveway and watch Maddison ride, so that’s a plus!”