Chipps quizzes Chris Akrigg just before he announces his new bike sponsor, GT, after 12 years on Mongoose.
Words & Photography Chipps
I’m watching Chris Akrigg ride a bike through his local Yorkshire woods, and there’s something different about him. It’s nothing to do with his riding style – which is a mix of aggression, pinpoint accuracy and uncontrolled wildness as ever… No, there’s something about his bike. It’s not a Mongoose.
Chris Akrigg is riding a bright blue GT. For a dozen years, we’ve become accustomed to seeing Chris appearing in his self-made videos to alternately finesse and bully his way through trail features and up and over obstacles on assorted Mongoose bikes. That era has come to an end as one sponsorship finishes and another begins. Today is Chris’s first day of riding on a GT.
Our Monday-morning photo shoot in the woods is literally the first time Chris has ridden his new team bike, a full suspension GT Force. He’d spent his Sunday building it up from a large box of bits, before settling down to watch the snooker with a bottle of wine.
Wait? Is this the same young, fiery Akrigg that we’re talking about? As he launches off a chest-high drop, his version of a warm-up, that same riding style is evident. There’s still a sense of movement and urgency in his effort; always moving forward, bringing the viewer, whether that’s in person or in his many videos, with him as he moves quickly on to the next problem. However, it seems that this change in sponsors has happened in tandem with a slow move towards a more holistic view of his career. Being paid to ride bikes for a living was something he fell into in the first place and re-signing with Mongoose every couple of years hadn’t really given him a chance to step back and consider where all of this was heading.
Now, with a fresh start (albeit at a sister company of Mongoose) and at the age of forty five he’s slowed down for just a moment to see where he wants to be. And what he sees appears to have him very enthusiastic for the future.
Too much rope.
The decision to leave Mongoose after what he thinks is “probably 12 years” didn’t happen quickly; it was a slow dawning that time was coming to an end for a partnership that had supported him over much of his professional riding career so far. Chris has always based his videos on the bikes he rides; Mongoose launched a gravel bike, so he did a video with a gravel bike. He rode a fixie when they made a fixie, but with a limited palette of mountain bikes on offer and no great innovation over the last few years, the inspiration was wearing a little thin. With GT there was also the chance of doing something with e-bikes, which Mongoose doesn’t offer.
“That wasn’t the deciding factor, but it was one of the reasons. [With e-bikes] I’m really intrigued – the background I come from, motorbike trials, e-bikes make sense. And the way I ride an e-bike will be different to how other people do it…”
The main source of frustration with Mongoose seems to have been partly of his own making. Mongoose was a very hands-off sponsor, giving Chris free rein to come up with ideas for his videos. Perhaps too much. As he says: “If you get given too much free rope, you can hang yourself.”
The new relationship with GT will have more structure, certainly due to the bigger staff numbers behind the brand, as well as a greater UK presence, which is something Mongoose doesn’t have with mountain bikes here. This was another source of frustration for Chris and puzzlement for his UK fans who wondered why he was riding bikes they often couldn’t buy.
Instead of a half dozen big edits a year, GT is keen to get more regular, bite-size content for today’s short attention spans. And with an impressive collection of bikes to choose from, there will be a lot of variety in what he films for GT.
“For this year I have a fleet of bikes available to me. Four or five bikes. I’ll use a Force 27.5, a GT Grade cyclocross/gravel bike, the Amp e-bike, a La Bomba jump bike – I’ve not ridden any street stuff for a while – and a Force 29er too.”
It seems that whatever shapes the bikes come in, Chris will find an angle. “At the end of the day I like riding bikes…,” he quips over a cup of Yorkshire tea and iced bun from the local butchers. He really is as stereotypically Yorkshire as he likes to make out. Oh, and it’s ‘ay-krigg’ not ‘ack-rigg’.
A rider’s ride.
“Chris is a rider’s rider,” says Martyn Ashton in an interview for Chris Akrigg’s popular YouTube channel. “You’ve got to know your riding to really understand how good some of it is because he makes it look so easy and so fluid. And he’s trying to do that ALL OF THE TIME!”
Indeed to the casual observer, the riding that Chris does just looks like regular trail riding, right? Over a few rocks, and mostly on a trail, instead of the more clinical big-budget set-pieces that the likes of Danny MacAskill rides. The reality is that Akrigg seems to go out of his way to make things hard for himself. He’ll ride sections switch-footed (so that his non-favourite foot is leading) or if he’s riding a gravel bike, he’ll force himself to clip in when he normally rides flats. His urgent riding style too is partly from a dislike of back-pedalling or hopping in place in trials moves. He always wants his videos to have a sense of flow to them, and stopping and back-pedalling to get a run-up spoils that momentum. Always full gas and always moving, that’s Chris. And if only a tiny percentage notice that he’s switch-footed for a move, he’s still going to be happy because he knows that was how he rode.
As a rider who often films himself and also edits it, Chris has a very clear idea of the overall aesthetic. He knows the angles and the moves already. He can see the colours of the lichen-covered rocks and the bare trees against today’s watery blue, winter skies. He’s already ridden it in his mind and he knows how it’s going to look, whether that’s for a magazine photo, or for a whole video sequence. Sometimes the obvious shot is furthest from his mind as he looks for original lines.
This ‘big picture’ thinking helps shape how his final videos look and feel, but in the past it often led to frustration and the odd bit of bike throwing.
“I’m hypercritical about my riding. You can see things back on the camera, but I’ll immediately know when I need to redo something.”
Compared with the film crews and big-brand budgets of many of his peers, Chris has a much simpler outlook and a much more raw aesthetic. Often it’s just him with a camera on a tripod in the woods or an old factory. If it’s a big shoot, it’ll be Chris and his mate Will Evans in the woods. A third collaborator, Jimmy, then composes the music for the bigger pieces. No royalty-free clips or old metal tracks here.
Persecuted.
This natural feel, using glacier-dumped rocks on the moors, sea cliffs or old mine workings and unfinished Spanish apartment blocks, has given Akrigg a perverse inferiority complex when he sees the squeaky clean set pieces of a rider like his friend Danny MacAskill.
“Danny’s stuff is so relatable. People know what a park bench or a phone box looks like. It’s easy for him to get across how difficult something is. I’m not saying who’s better. But the stuff I ride is very hard to get across how difficult it is. I’ve made a rod for my own back really. I’ll ride green, slippy, horrible rocks with no run-up, no run out, horrible bike lengths, stuff to catch your bike up and stuff. That’s what I like. Finding really hard stuff.”
…and making it look really easy. That seems to be the magic of his videos.
“I try to make it as legit as possible from a riding point of view. I don’t do tricks. I don’t jump over stuff, spin me bars and go upside-down and that’s something I’ve never pursued. At one point I did. I started learning tricks, I learned backflips and some other stuff. I went and shot stuff with some more Danny-style moves and watched it back and thought ‘I looks like I’m trying to be someone else’.
“One of my friends was round and he watched a video of me doing a 360 off this tree. I took ages doing it. He watched and said ‘What are you doing? You look ridiculous!’
“I learned flips and found this rock I wanted to flip off – and I thought ‘It’s not even worth it. My riding’s always been A to B, over crazy shit.’ I don’t make things easy for myself.
“If you get it right, it just looks like riding down the street.”
It just looks gross.
So, is the Chris Akrigg these days a little less gung-ho?
“I’m a bit more – not that I walk away from stuff, but if it’s super hard and it’s risky, it still might look shit… I’ve done some sketchy shit and I’ve filmed it and it’s looked terrible. And it didn’t even go in!
“Two days before I broke my leg on that cliff [where he fell 60ft and broke his femur and wrist], I did this thing up near Otley. It’s a big climbing crag. I did a sketchy gap there – the drop was twice as big as the one I fell off, and it was sketchy and wet. We filmed it and I got away with it, thought ‘I got away with murder there’– but I looked back at it on the camera and it just looked shit, but I thought ‘Oh well, I’ll put it on anyway’.
“I went out the next day and filmed and went back to see the cliff jump and I’d deleted it off the card and filmed over it, so there was no way to recover it. That’s why I went up to get that other jump that I crashed on.
“These days I might think about things a little more, but I just think my riding style’s changed. I’m just trying to ride more super-technical stuff – keep everything flowing. It needs to be purposeful, not just to do it for the sake of it. If you’re doing tech stuff, it has to look perfect and not too janky.
“With the big stuff, you’re just doing big stuff for big’s sake. Sometimes you do something big, something risky and get a buzz off it, which is cool. But sometimes you think ‘We’ve got some technical stuff, we’ve got some fast stuff, now I just need to drop off something big’.
“Dropping off big stuff now, it can just look a little bit gross… there’s got to be a reason for something to be big.
“It’s like tricks. I don’t get excited by riding tricks. I used to ride a lot of BMX. When I watch my old videos – doing tailwhips and barspins to manuals… I used to be able to do it all, but I don’t do it anymore. I just don’t enjoy it. Tricks don’t do anything for me. They don’t make me feel like when I do a big step, or some horrible line in the woods with some rooty, horrible shit.”
Moving on and not growing up.
This new move, down the road from Mongoose to GT, is going to give us more Chris Akrigg in our inboxes and phone feeds. There’s a new fire in the Yorkshireman’s eyes and he seems genuinely excited by the opportunity. Far from settling down and looking for an easy way out, he’s keen to keep on finding harder and harder lines to make look fast and fluid.
“I’m still riding my bike for a living. I enjoy riding and I enjoy filming. But also, people seem to still enjoy watching it. If I felt like I was only doing this for another year to get another wage out of it… [shakes his head] …it’s not like that. I feel like I can still push and I’m still riding good and people still seem to like what I do, video-wise.
“Like any job, you’ve got to keep enjoying it. I’m not getting any younger… I’ve been doing it for a long time.
“Loads of people say ‘What are you going to do after you finish riding bikes?’. That comes up a lot – especially now I’m not 21 anymore. I still feel like I can still ride my bike well. I was speaking to Martyn Ashton about it – I was thinking ‘Maybe I’ve got a few years left’ and he was like ‘You don’t need to think like that’. There’s other things – like Martyn does presenting. I don’t see myself doing that, but there are other things. Bikes aren’t going away…
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up, but I’m happy riding my bike for the moment. There’ll come a time where I won’t want to keep throwing myself down steep stuff.
“The one thing about my job is that you can’t delegate. If somebody’s going down that on a bike, it’s going to be me.”
