Finn Iles Has Ridden A-Line "Well Over a Thousand Times" 1

Finn's estimation skills are as good as his scrubbing skills.

During the Fox Air DH at Crankworx yesterday, winner and birthday boy, Finn Iles, confidently told Micayla Gatto during a pre-race interview that he’s ridden the world-renowned A-Line trail well over 1,000 times. The jump-filled A-Line of Whistler Bike Park is so famous that people spend well over thousands of dollars to travel across the globe just to case its table tops. The trail even has a logo and branding with a complete merchandising effort so the aforementioned visitors can proudly prove they've survived the trail via A-Line stickers, hats and shirts.

Everyone knows this social media generation is prone to exaggeration with plenty of “BEST (insert anything) EVER” Instagram posts or the use of way too many exclamation marks (which I'm totally guilty of despite Ferrentino’s complete disdain for the sentence-ending punctuation that has basically replaced the period in everyday communication!!!).

 

While still reveling (along with commentator, Cam McCaul) from Finn’s final scrub before he crossed the finish line with the fastest time, I had to see if Finn’s estimation skills were as solid as his bike-handling skills. To quote The Simpsons, I’m no “scientition,” but let’s try anyway. You formally trained nerds should go deeper in the comments.

Finn Iles, 19 as of yesterday, celebrating in typical Whistler fashion at the Longhorn tonight, has been riding Whistler since he was 7 years old and he claims riding A-Line back in that first year of hitting up the park. 12 years of riding A-Line for a Whistler local - can that equal 1,000 laps?

The 2018 Whistler season (May 18th through October 8th) means the bike park is open for 143 days. If we go conservative and say that the bike park has been open for 100 days per year over the last 12 years (it’s way too much work to research every season’s days-open numbers), that offers up 1200 days of potential bike park lapping.

The 1000-lap claim.

Clearly, Finn hasn’t ridden every single open day at the bike park for the last 12 years, so let’s say Finn rode an average of 50 days per year at the park. 50 x 12 is 600 days of riding, so if he rode A-Line 2 times per visit, he’d be at 1,200 laps. This is a plausible number of laps for the young Bieber-esque pinner to have pounded out. If we cut the average number of riding days to 25 per year, he’d have ridden the park 300 times over 12 years. A 3.34-lap average per visit would yield that magic 1,000 figure. Also very plausible and probably on the shy side of things.

5 years ago, Finn was doing plenty of laps.

The conclusion? Finn Iles is pretty f’ing good at estimating how many times he’s ridden A-Line and we're glad to see he's more than just a pretty face riding fast on a bike. The real conclusion? Finn scrubbing A-Line jumps at race pace is more exciting than any of these statistics. I also like his idea of a Big-Brother-inspired-electronic-A-Line-lap-monitoring system installed on the mountain. What with modern sponsorship and all, we have no doubt this feature will show up, covered in beer or handbag branding sometime soon.

Fox Air DH Results



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