Casey Brown will be one of the first women to compete on the world’s largest freeride stage at Red Bull Rampage in October. She rides in Whistler, B.C., at the Crankworx mountain bike festival on July 26.Alana Paterson/The Globe and Mail
At 13 years old, the only item on Casey Brown’s Christmas wish list was a Kona Stinky – the perfect mountain bike for a beginner looking to level up the difficulty of their ride.
With her Kona-sponsored brother rigging up a sweet deal, and her parents agreeing to pay half, Brown, now 33, mowed lawns and babysat all year to scrounge up enough cash for her side of the bargain.
That Christmas, she got what she wished for and with it, came her dream of being a professional freerider.
Freeriding is a type of mountain biking designed to push the limits of what’s possible. Featuring gnarly jumps, towering drops and undeniable risk, it’s a loosely defined discipline whose focus rests more on celebrating achieving the impossible than being the first across the line.
In October, Brown will be one of the first women to compete on the world’s largest freeride stage at Red Bull Rampage. Born in 2001 and held on the outskirts of Zion National Park, Utah, the death-defying competition is the pinnacle of the sport. This year will be its 18th edition but the first to include a women’s category, which will feature eight invited athletes – three of which are Canadians. The women’s event will be held on Oct. 10, a couple of days before the men’s event on Oct. 12, which will feature 18 invited male athletes.
Darcy Hennessey, a filmmaker and former professional freerider, said at its origins in the nineties, freeride was a very egalitarian sport in which women were testing the limits of what was possible alongside men. But as it took off, she said women were left behind by sponsorship dollars and media coverage, backtracking what used to be a sport with a tangible gender balance.
“There was less visibility in the media and far less sponsorship dollars because a lot of the times the marketing teams at bike companies were run by men,” Hennessey said.
As a teenager growing up in the early 2000s, Brown said she had very few role models to look up to in the freeride space. And those that were trying to make it in the industry had to fit a certain aesthetic while keeping up their regular mountain biking race schedule on the side.
“It wasn’t what I envisioned for free ride. I wanted to be like the guys, just sending and building your lines and having awesome trails to ride,” she said.
Lucy Van Eesteren rides Whistler during Crankworx on July 26. At 19 years old, Eesteren applied for a spot in Red Bull Rampage this year but didn’t quite make the cut.Alana Paterson/The Globe and Mail
Building trails and “sending” it down the mountain was how Red Bull Rampage began 23 years ago. At its origins, the event was a raw version of what it is today. Very little modifications were made by riders to the natural landscape as they learned to navigate the desert terrain, and an $8,000 prize pot was available. These days, the competition offers up hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and athletes spend eight days beforehand either digging, building or practising their routes. Despite its founding more than two decades ago, the event has only been held 17 times, after taking a hiatus between 2004 and 2008, and then taking place every other year until 2012. Rampage was also cancelled in 2020.
Unlike a mountain biking world cup, in which everyone rides the same course, Rampage gives athletes the creative freedom to design their own run and opens the door to some spectacular – yet extremely dicey – features aimed at impressing the judges, who are often riders themselves.
With two “diggers” by their side, competitors spend days linking their start and finish lines to set themselves up to score maximum points for creativity and skill. On the day of the event, each rider gets two attempts at nailing their line on the steep, rocky terrain before the winner is announced.
Vaea Verbeeck, a professional mountain biker who grew up in Quebec and will be competing alongside Brown at Rampage this year, said she started thinking about a women’s category in 2018 when she was invited to a dinner with some of her fellow women athletes and Red Bull staff. At the meal, the question of ‘Why are there no women in Rampage?’ was raised.
“I was like, ‘It might not be for myself right now, but I know some girls,’” she said. “I knew at the time Casey was vouching for it, and I thought, ‘If you’re into that and you work towards that, you should absolutely be able to pursue that.’”
One year later, Verbeeck found herself among the six women invited to attend a pre-Rampage, women’s-only invitational designed to help carve out a path for them in the male-dominated sport.
Vaea Verbeeck, a prolific freerider, had to sit out Crankworx with a broken arm. She will be competing alongside Brown at Rampage this year.Alana Paterson/The Globe and Mail
The event, titled Red Bull Formation and founded by Katie Holden, an athlete and advocate for gender equity in sport, brought the women out to the Utah desert a couple weeks before Rampage to build and ride their own lines in a non-competitive environment.
Holden said the goal of Formation was to build women up in the freeride space and get them accustomed to the super-exposed terrain. It wasn’t a substitute for having women ride in Rampage, it was a step toward it.
“Having not been included in that space for all those years, to go and put women into a Rampage right from the get-go definitely wouldn’t have set anyone up for success,” Holden said. “I’m sure they could have held their own, but I don’t think we would be in this position right now if it weren’t for those girls really building the space for themselves.”
Verbeeck said at the start, most of the girls felt a little out of their element. With limited opportunities for women in the freeride space, runs on sketchy terrain such as that facing them in Utah was far from what they were used to riding.
“We were all really scared of what we were building. Then the first time we dropped in and rode our lines, we were like, ‘Oh shit. This is really easy.’ Not that it was easy, but it rode so much easier, versus how nervous it made us prior to riding it,” she said.
After 2019, the event was held twice more in 2021 and 2022, skipping over the pandemic year of 2020. The last time it was held, Verbeeck said the progress made by the athletes, whose numbers increased to 12 attendees, was visible. By the final year, they were riding old Rampage lines top to bottom.
“It was just about having the environment and the space for us to do it,” she said.
But in 2023, news of Formation’s cancellation sent shock waves through its burgeoning community.
Georgia Astle, a professional mountain biker from Whistler, B.C., said it felt like an end to the women’s dreams when Formation’s fourth edition was called off.
“I was in denial,” said Astle, who took part in Formation two years ago and will be the third Canadian woman competing at Rampage this year. “I was like, ‘Okay, they’re not doing it in the spring, but they’re going to do it in the fall around Rampage. That’ll be really cool.’”
Formation didn’t return in the fall, or at all that year. No explanation was given for its cancellation. Astle said her best guess as to why the decision was made was that it was in anticipation of this year’s Rampage category, which was unknown to the women at the time.
Getting women into Rampage is something Holden said she has thought about every single day for at least the past five years. When the new category was decided upon, she heard the news directly from Red Bull.
“I felt like I cried for two days,” she said. “There were a lot of emotions wrapped up in this, over such a long period and such a grind, that it was just this flood of emotion.”
Inclusion in Rampage is critical for women in the sport, Brown said, because while Formation gave them a space to develop, it never would have put them on the same stage as Rampage.
Now, with their spot at the top, she is ecstatic about the precedent it will set for younger riders.
“The trickledown effect of having a women’s category in Rampage is going to be huge,” Brown said. “There is going to be an influx of young girls that don’t necessarily have to go racing to make a career out of mountain biking. They can go and be freeriders.”
At 19 years old, Lucy Van Eesteren applied for a spot in Rampage this year but didn’t quite make the cut. The Squamish, B.C.-based freerider is part of the next generation of freeriders that is hoping to benefit from this new category for years to come.
She credits Brown for her trajectory into the freeride world, after she went to dig for her at Formation in 2021.
“That really changed the course of my biking career because I dropped out of in-person high school and I went online so I could go on the trip to Formation,” she said.
Freeriders Casey Brown and Lucy Van Eesteren have a chat as they wait for the Whistler gondola during Crankworx on July 26. Van Eesteren credits Brown for her trajectory into the freeride world, after she went to dig for her at Red Bull Formation in 2021.Alana Paterson/The Globe and Mail
Until recently, Van Eesteren said Rampage was a lofty goal that lived in a pipe dream. She didn’t think it would become a reality so soon and is excited because it etches a clear path for young women interested in the sport.
“Now that women are going to be in Rampage, it’s like, what can’t women do?” she said. “If they’re in the gnarliest, scariest event, it just finalizes that they can do any event out there.”
Women were part of the core crew who wrote the origin story of freeride and changed what could be done on a mountain bike, Hennessey said. She’s glad to see the sport returning to a diverse landscape of riders who she said will continue to push the sport forwards.
With the extremely short timeline between the application deadline, invited athletes being announced and the actual event taking place, each woman has taken to preparations in their own way.
Verbeeck said the competition has made her more hesitant to attend some of the events she had on her calendar for September, and she’ll be focusing on training either at home or in Utah.
Brown said she has pared down her busy schedule to focus on practising the skills she’ll need for Rampage, which includes more time in the gym and riding technical terrain. She also plans to work on her trail-building skills and to test out her tricks in a personal facility she built, which includes her own airbag to land on for safety.
Both the men’s and women’s events in October will be broadcast on ESPN+ and Red Bull TV, and the top five athletes in each competition will receive equal prize money, organizers have stated. While the men will return to their 2018/2019 Rampage venue, the women will compete in a raw, untouched zone directly beside it, giving them the opportunity to build their runs entirely from scratch.