Een Belg pakt uit met een "echt" pro bike park

[Plons]

Blijkbaar ne Belg die nu in spanje woont



While spending some time on the French Riviera, shooting Fabien Barel with the NWD folks, waiting for the next World Cup in Andorra I decided to check out the Fenasosa Mountain Bike Park ( www.lafenasosabikepark.es) in the Valencia region of Spain. Luis Molina, the Spanish Davinci Bicycles importer, had been raving so much about the place that I hitched a ride there with his buddy Chus Castellanos. Since I live in Seattle, a mere 4 hours away from the mecca of bike parks, Whistler, I was prepared to be underwhelmed.

Boy howdy, was I wrong!

Fenasosa Bike Park is the brainchild of Jean Phillippa Orban, a former Moto GP racer from Belgium who relocated here at the end of his career. He got into Fenasosa when it was a game farm and lavender plantation. With the cost of labor for the lavender harvest increasing, that had to go; and the game farm was a bit too seasonal for him—he likes to keep busy—so he began searching for options that could co-exist with the game farm concept. The first thought—motos—was a no go it’d scare the animals. But his son Alex, a top ranked moto racer at the tender age of 14, had just made the conversion to DH mountain biking through friends and after watching some videos. Jean Phillippa hit on the idea of adding a private mountain bike park, as both a side business and for Alex’s training.




The park is pretty straightforward. It has an large 4X track—lengthy but not too technical, a bike stunt park for slope style and freeride training, 5 different DH tracks with plans for more, a long XC loop, and a monster jump line that would make John Cowan proud. In short, it’s everything a kid with aspirations to grow up racing in the big time could want.

More importantly, it is perhaps the next step in evolution for bike parks. The current formula is based on winter sports. For that, places like Whistler and Portes du Soleil serve as models of lift serviced bike parks, and heli biking has been around for a while already. The Fenasosa concept includes a private, shuttle-served mountain bike park, limited to a maximum of 45 clients per day, which is something more like what you get in a back country snow cat operation deep in the Selkirks—solitude, exclusivity at a price, and an experience that is hard to shake.

fotos : http://www.bikemag.com/gallery/fenasosa ... n_meagher/

[DESL]

Mooi mooi, maar is dat reden om er 2 topics over aan te maken?

[Chmod]

iets voor volgende winter!

[ELVIS]

Bassie en Adriaan zaten ook veel in spanje

[schnitzer]

Mooi mooi, maar is dat reden om er 2 topics over aan te maken?

zo gaat dat met die oude venten, pilletje vergeten s'morgens en ja 2 topics

[driezzz_dirter]

een deel van de picture is daar opgenomen
deftig park