Fly into the final
© Sam Needham/Red Bull Content Pool
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“I never thought we’d get it finished in time!”
Dan Atherton takes us down his Hardline DH track and shares the challenges he faced building it.
Written by Dan Atherton
3 min readPublished on
Hardline course
Hardline course © Sam Needham/Red Bull Content Pool
Hardline was so stressful – we had six weeks to build it and there was literally nothing there. I thought it was impossible really. We were getting up at 5 o’clock and working until 9pm or 10pm every day for six weeks. We had one day off when it rained, heavily. We were all shattered.
The top of the track
The top of the track© Sam Needham/Red Bull Content Pool
Peaty Heights
The start! An easy build to start us off gently in the three-and-a-half-tonner. It took us three hours to get through the bog to the track, an hour to build and then another three hours to get the machine out again! Honestly there’s a few times I was up to the doors in bog and I didn’t think I was gonna get out.
Moving down the hillside
Moving down the hillside© Sam Needham/Red Bull Content Pool
Off Camberlands
This section was mainly built because of filming with the heli and because of the positioning next to the waterfall. We kept this part really natural and just worked with the terrain. I guess this was the one place you could take a breath before plunging into the rest of the course.
Step Up
I definitely tried to think about how this jump would look for filming. Gaz [World Cup rider Gareth Brewin] and I dragged a massive tree stump down with the digger, then smashed up a lot of vehicles trying to position it in a cool place at the side of the landing! The first person to test it out was Gaz on his trail bike – he made it look easy! The feeling when you hit it on your downhill bike was amazing; you’d come flat-out out of the woods, tucked all the way round the corner, begging for speed and hit the lip at full bore!
Midway through...
Midway through...© Sam Needham/Red Bull Content Pool
The Slab
We needed a lot of manpower to dig out the big berm that came immediately after and even though we put in days of work it still needed to be bigger! This bit would have been impossible without Setch’s army mates pulling out all the stops to get the stumps dug out.
Off The Wall
A really natural part of the track. This is a dry stone wall that used to be deep in the forest, I don’t know why, maybe it was some kind of border? But the Forestry had just clear-felled all around it so it was really stark with no green anywhere – it looked amazing.
Jumps ahoy
Jumps ahoy© Sam Needham/Red Bull Content Pool
Road Gap
The big one! From the first time we walked down the mountain we knew that this was going to be the big thing. I had to go away for a few weeks to race the Enduro World Series so Olly Davey [Dan’s mechanic] started building. He single-handedly constructed a timber frame, which became a work of art. Although [brother] Gee and I were nervous as hell to try it we knew that it was built right. Hitting this one with him for the first time is definitely the reason I built Hardline.
Final Fly off
This whole Hardline build has been in the back of my mind for a few years but it was only made possible because of Olly Davey. He was 100 percent on it from start to finish, at times he made me feel lazy!
The last obstacle on the course pretty much sums up Olly’s story, coming from Snowboarding he likes to go big and doesn’t think of the consequences! For this last jump he built a massive cannon, had I let him it would have been built twice as big!
Fly into the final
Fly into the final© Sam Needham/Red Bull Content Pool
Watch Dan's creation come to life at Hardline 2014.
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Gee Atherton

A multiple world champion, World Cup winner and Red Bull Rampage podium finisher, Gee Atherton is one of the greatest MTB riders of his generation.

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