Extreme sports attract crowds

High-energy music, from hip-hop to metal to alt rock, blared at a crowd of a couple hundred spectators inside a North Plains warehouse. Their necks moved in sync, craning from right to left and back as dozens of the world’s top trick mountain bikers looped up, down and around a dirt course that snaked along the edge of the building.

For more than three hours on a Tuesday evening in March, the competitors dazzled the crowd by dropping onto the course from a 17-foot-high ramp, then zooming into a dizzying array of acrobatics — back flips, tailwhips and 360-degree revolutions — often topped off with a “suicide,” or no hands on the handlebars.

Organizers chose Oregon to kick off the inaugural Wham Bam Thank You Jam slopestyle mountain bike series — with stops in Keystone, Colo.; Tamarack, Idaho; and Government Camp — for good reason.

 – Excerpt from The Oregonian, April 22, 2007