Must See Video: Kriss Kyle on Madeira

FREERIDE: You only spent six days on Madeira for your web film. A tight schedule for a video project, isn't it?

Kriss Kyle: That's true. But there was no other way to organise it. I'd only been to Madeira once before and immediately fell in love with the island. I felt I wanted to go here again. The film crew and I didn't really have a plan. All we knew was that we wanted to shoot a video. So we just got going, found features during the descents and started filming.

In the video you can see how you adapt your BMX style to the mountain bike. How much harder are tricks on a mountain bike?

Much harder. It's almost as if I had to learn the sport all over again. Flairs, for example: you have to pull so much harder than on a BMX. The same goes for other tricks. A mountain bike is big and unwieldy in comparison. You don't want to know how long it took me to get used to the brakes on the handlebars. I tell you, a BMX may also have two wheels, but it's a different piece of sports equipment.

What frame size do you ride?

I ride an S-frame, but I'm also only 1.70 metres tall. For this video project, I put a 26-inch wheel in my frame. You can call it a mini-mullet: 27.5-inch front, 26-inch rear. That works perfectly for me. I'm surprised that others don't do that.

How much influence do you have on the finished film?

About as much as the film maker (laughs). I've been working with Matty Lambert for years. He has a good eye and we complement each other perfectly. He has high standards, sometimes even higher than me. Then he sends me up the mountain again. Again and again. I want to have a say in the music. For our Madeira edit, we already had the song before we started filming. So the music wasn't tailored to the video, but the video to the song.

You once described knee pads as a no-go, but in your video you were wearing them. How did you change your mind?

That's true. I actually had to make my own experiences. I come from BMX, where nobody wears knee pads. The thought alone drove me crazy. But then I fell off-road, including on my knee. It was during a film project at the beginning of the year. From then on, I wanted to protect my knees. The only problem was that I had this realisation in the middle of a video project. My filmmaker Matty protested, he didn't like the detail that I can be seen in the finished film without knee pads at the beginning and later with them.