Yannick Granieri

My coolest bike experience was ...

Oh, wow, hard question actually hard to choose one in the million adventure I had !

I would say my first international contest overseas ! At the time it was called the Kokanee Crankworx slopestyle ! Back then u had to be invited to participate to the event. I had no invite never fly outside of Europe and my English sucked ! Here I go to the airport in Lyon of to Paris then from Paris to Vancouver ! 12 hours later im at the airport Vancouver no one speak French I just realize that whistler is not in Vancouver but 2,5 hours away I’ve got no car and clearly no clue how to get up there ! Lucky me I found some random dude with is bike with a sticker whistler on his bike box. So I asked him ( with my poor English ) are u going to whistler ? Yes ! Can I follow u ?
Then the guy explain me with the shuttle bus and so on ! So we jumped into the shuttle to get up there. The only thing I had was a French friend with a hotel booked for one week ! Whistler is somewhere very special for biker. First time u put ur wheels there u realize that it does exist ! A place like actually exist ! It’s surreal , bike all over the place , bike shops every 100 m hotel bike friendly night club parties everyday of the week ! For a kid like me it was very cool to experience something I only had in my dream !
First day building my 2 bikes , dh and DJ. My French friend Jeremy already knew the trails so it was simple for me to just follow him.

After one week of DH , parties and laugh slopestyle event was about to start but I was not invite ! Not yet !
Lucky me I got to meet the legendary Cam Mccaul at some European event and he could claim my capabilities of being good on the dirt jump bike and that I need a spot to ride the event ! After 100 mails different meeting and discussion Cam got me an invite the day before practice start ! Next day im up there on my DJ bike with thousand people cheering at us and watching us ! Im scared jumps are big , there was step up , big drops ,  giant wall ride the course was very long ! I remember at that time I was like what did I put myself into damned ! I knew now one expect CAM. I was the new comer kid coming from france who didn’t speak English ! Great !

I watch and watch for hours before touching my bike I was very nervous. Then most of the guys left and could jump the first feature !
The jump was massive , I cranked my ass off so I make sure I was not gonna case the landing , but clearly I cranked to hard so I land like 5 m after the landing to flat my back tire exploded and I crashed everyone rush at me to see if I was still alive. I was on the floor praying that nothing broke on my bike or any bones. I move first my arms : ok all good , then my legs : ok check and everyone was around me saying things but I couldn’t understand a word but I could understand that they want it to check if everything was ok. They got me on my legs and everything was fine even my bike had nothing. This is exactly what I needed a good crash to realize that even in canada u can crash and be fine. Next day I felt confident to ride the all course and people start to talk to me. A couple parties and lots of practice got me confident to finish 10 th at the event. I was so hyped and this was the beginning of a super star life ! The rest is history.