Race Face UFC - Matt Hunter takes the 10G Paycheck

Cameron McCaul - a burly rider to watch
It's all wrapped up. The grounds at Laguna Seca have been cleaned and the site of Sea Otter will once be reclaimed by motor sports enthusiasts until next spring. Matt Hunter and Cameron McCaul both got rides to Monterey paid for by Race Face. Unfortunately for McCaul he lives just up the road. Having bushels of friends and family there must have made the announcement sting a little more. There's always next year for the young lad though and at the very least he managed to let the world know that he's a talented, ballsy dirt jumping fool.
Kamloops' own Matt Hunter had the UFC tiara passed to him by Tyler 'Super T' Klassen, last year's champion. Saying he has big shoes to fill doesn't even scratch the surface.

Tyler 'Super T' Klassen after winning the Red Bull Rampage
Using the same yardstick to compare them isn't really fair though. Tyler was emerging as a rider to watch long before his minute of madness showed up in the UFC sweet 16. The fact that most of his UFC footage was shot by Digger for NSX V is testament to that. He was already a regular in Danger Dan's flow show as well and I think it's pretty likely that Tyler's year would have been huge even without the title. Matt Hunter is undoubtedly a talented rider but for him the UFC will mean he'll gain recognition that otherwise would have taken some time.
Brett Tippie spotted him long before he made his way to the finals and had been lobbying Specialized to put a Big Hit under him. Matt's success in the Challenge bolstered Tippie's claims and he is now riding for the big S.


Super T and his mechanics
All in all this was an interesting exercise. It gave us an opportunity to reflect on what we value as riders and also to comment with our votes on where our sport should go. Last year there was some controversy about who really is a pro rider and who should be eligible for the Challenge. This year the qualification guidelines were tightened up and as a result we were exposed to a great group of talented riders most of us had never heard of before.
Some riders to watch include Neil Meier, Ryan Hayes, Geoff Gulevich and escaped mental patient Andrew Szyc. I really hope they don't put him back in the padded room because I would love to see more footage of the nutbar Aussie. Katrina Strand proved she can ride with the lads and she came very close to making it to the next round. Who knows what would have happened if she hadn't been up against the eventual winner. It's pretty cool to see riders like Tyler Jorgenson from Arizona and David Davies from Kentucky charging hard. The kind of riding we do really is going making inroads. There wasn't a rider in the sweet 16 who didn't impress me on some level.

There are a few things I would like to see to take the event to the next level. It would be great if some sort of independent auditing was used to make the voting process truly transparent. Perhaps having some suit with a sealed envelope would be going overboard but it seems to me that steps could be taken to give voters and riders assurances that the top vote-getter moves on - rather than the most marketable rider. The reality of business is that Tyler Klassen is continuing on with Race Face because he's good for revenue and that bottom line means that the temptation is there to fudge the results if the brass doesn't like them. Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying this has happened but I am saying that the appearance of fairness is very important in these sordid times. The folks at Race Face are a solid and scrupulous bunch but I do believe steps in this direction would take the Challenge to the big time

UFC Champion for 2003
It would also be ideal if there was some way of ensuring that riders can only vote once. The way it stands now you can vote 60 times if you have 60 email addresses. With services like Hotmail and Yahoo around it's pretty easy to sign up for scores of accounts and there is no doubt that some voters do just that. One way to combat this would be to disallow free email services.

We do this for the nsmb bulletin boards for that very reason and it works well. Unfortunately it also prevents some excellent folks without access to a POP account from joining up,, which means they wouldn't be able to vote for the UFC if this approach was taken. This would be a tough decision to make but it would make the results more meaningful.

Marshall Rutman - Race Face's marketing wizard.
Congratulations Matt - I look forward to meeting you and seeing you ride in next winters video crop. Props also to Marshall Rutman of Race Face for getting the UFC off the ground and keeping us glued to our monitors for a month or so - great work bro! With the freeride virus spreading faster than SARS next year should be even better.

The announcement in Monterey

Check out the great wrap up video on the Race Face site - all 35 megs of it. You get to revisit Tyler's winning 60 seconds from last year as well as some highlights of his year. You also get a second viewing of McCaul's and Hunter's videos and the announcement at Sea Otter.