Brandon Semenuk Interview – Freeride and Rally Racing

Brandon Semenuk is on the phone, answering questions he’s heard before. He’s at home on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada, but he’s not sitting still. That’s not something Semenuk does. As he speaks, he’s piecing together a bike rack.

Here’s the first thing you need to know about Semenuk: he’s a Canadian freeride and slopestyle mountain-biking (MTB) legend, the most decorated athlete at Red Bull Joyride, having won the marquee slopestyle event in Whistler, BC, five times between 2011 and 2017. During that span, he also took three Freeride Mountain Bike World Tour series titles. His groundbreaking segment from the 2015 mountain-biking film unReal, shot in one uninterrupted take on a custom-built track in California, has been viewed more than six million times. He’s also the only person to win Red Bull Rampage four times.

Red Bull Rampage is the pinnacle of freeride mountain-biking events – not a race, but an invitation-only competition where the world’s greatest riders test their skill, nerve, verve and ingenuity. Held among the towering canyons near Zion National Park in Utah, USA, the event sees participants spend two days in the sweltering heat with hand shovels, digging out a riding line from top to bottom of a seemingly unnavigable mountainside. Then they have to navigate it. In the most spectacular and creative way possible. No one who competes at Rampage is anything less than the best, and yet Semenuk’s history there is without parallel.

What’s more, Semenuk wasn’t even there last year to set any records; he just wanted to try something new. “I’m stoked that it came to fruition, but it wasn’t a goal of mine,” he says. “I just wanted to be able to show up and do something different.”

Semenuk may lack the level of name recognition enjoyed by other action-sports stars who have redefined what’s possible – athletes like Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater or Shaun White – but he occupies the equivalent mantle in mountain biking. He’s the best there’s ever been; there’s no real debate about it. His riding is completely fluid yet impeccably precise; there’s a level of grace and technicality unmatched among his peers. Semenuk’s tricks aren’t just death-defying, they’re adjective-defying. “You could set it to jazz music, he makes it look so fucking easy,” says Mike Ferrentino, a columnist for BIKE Magazine who has written about mountain biking for five decades. But suggest he’s the GOAT and Semenuk characteristically deflects the praise.

And that’s the other thing you need to know about Semenuk: he’s a reluctant public figure who has spent his entire adult life in the spotlight. Unlike so many stars in the extreme-sports universe, he’s not flashy, he’s not covered in tattoos, he doesn’t close down bars. “Brandon is very introverted, quiet and unassuming,” says Cam Zink, an American freeride pioneer who, at 36, is five years Semenuk’s senior and was one of his earliest influences. “He keeps his personal life and his training hidden to let his riding do the talking.”

Indeed, Semenuk doesn’t really care whether or not you read this profile. What he does care about is progression – in his riding, in his videos and, lately, in his professional foray into rally car racing. If answering questions for this piece could help him progress as an athlete or creative, he might have a different viewpoint. But it won’t, so he compartmentalises. Nothing personal.

And yet it’s impossible to describe someone who has spent countless hours in front of a camera as simply walled off. Perhaps it’s best to view Semenuk’s true personality as hidden behind a paywall, and the currency required to gain entry is trust.

There have been two pivotal decisions that dramatically shaped the trajectory of Semenuk’s career. The first came while still a teenager, when he moved out of Whistler and bought a home on a few acres on the Sunshine Coast, across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver Island. The backyard soil became his private slopestyle course, complete with an air bag, ramps and jumps. Riding buddies crashed in spare rooms. Training on his own backyard jumps, Semenuk says, helped his progression escalate dramatically.

“It’s kind of a no-brainer,” he explains. “If you have that stuff in front of you, it’s just so much easier to wake up with an idea and actually go try it or play with it or build something new. It’s my space; I can change things and do what I need to do.”

The second pivotal decision came at the age of 24, when Semenuk formed the video brand Revel Co with filmmaker Rupert Walker. The result gave Semenuk creative control over his content, and it accelerated his transition away from competition and towards realising his own riding concepts.

If there was a genesis for Semenuk’s move into video production, it came from the Red Bull video series Life Behind Bars, which ran between 2012 and 2014 and featured an assortment of freeride pals travelling, riding and living the charmed life of young shredders. Looking back on that series, Semenuk says he sees someone “very different”, but it also informed his decision to take control of his content.

“People love [those videos], which is great, but it wasn’t something I was overly hyped on,” he says. “It was just a cool opportunity and [through it] I figured out the path I wanted to take.”

The finished product – two minutes of footage shot by Walker after three weeks of work – showcases Semenuk and Howard riding side by side down parallel tracks, weaving and crossing paths through a grove of oak trees and open fields. Howard calls the project the highlight of his career.

“A lot of people might think it’s all handed to [Semenuk]: here’s a location, here are these insane jumps,” says Howard. “But no, Brandon is the one coming up with the ideas and the locations. He’s doing all the behind-the-scenes work.”

Semenuk grew up in the mountain-bike paradise of Whistler with his father Mark and half brother Tyler West, who’s seven years his senior. His mother Linda lived across the water, a few hours away, on Vancouver Island.

Jenine Bourbonnais, owner of Whistler’s Evolution bike and snowboard shop, became Semenuk’s first sponsor when he was just seven. She remembers him tagging along with West, whom she already sponsored. Brandon handed her a handwritten résumé of what he liked to ride, and told her, in a serious tone, “I’d like to be on your team.”

“Right from that moment, he became a little buddy of mine,” Bourbonnais says. “We helped him out however we could – with parts, with tuning his bike. We were part of his life. He rode so much he needed stuff all the time.”

With Semenuk’s parents separated and his mother living some distance away, Bourbonnais became something of a maternal figure in his life, periodically checking on him, making sure he was doing his homework, mending his ripped-up jeans. She recalls that even at a young age he was not only skilled on a mountain bike but also a proficient skateboarder, snowboarder and alpine skier. At the age of 12, Semenuk took the Canadian under-14 national cross-country title; a year later, he won the 38km British Columbia cross-country championship, beating his closest competitor by more than 13 minutes.

Canadian pro mountain-biker Andrew Shandro was at the dirt jumps with his young son Ethan when he first met a 14-year-old Semenuk. That day, Ethan had taken a tumble, and before Shandro could get to him, the teenager was helping the boy up and dusting him off. “This kid was really good, I could see that,” recalls Shandro. “But I could also see he had a good heart.”

When they ran into each other again at the jumps a few weeks later, Shandro, who is sponsored by Trek, inquired about getting Semenuk on one of the brand’s bikes. Soon after, Semenuk turned pro and quit high school to travel and compete; he’s ridden for Trek ever since. Shandro became his mentor, signing Semenuk to Trek’s freeride team the C3 Project (the Cs stand for competition, cinematics and creativity).

Signing with Nike’s 6.0 action-sports brand not long after, a 15-year-old Semenuk took his first trip to Europe to compete in contests. He began spending his winters with friends in Aptos, California, a small beach town set among redwoods, which had, for two decades, served as home to the Post Office Jumps, one of the world’s most iconic dirt-jump spots. When Semenuk’s Californian friends would rent a house in Whistler during the summer, he’d stay with them instead of his family, sometimes sleeping in a closet.

Semenuk says he has operated with a high degree of automony as long as he can remember “My parents weren’t super controlling, they weren’t super concerned, they let me just have my freedom,” he says. “I’ve always been self-reliant, and self-dependent, just because of those things. I never really had to report back, I could go home, I could leave whenever I wanted, I could stay at my mom’s, I could stay at my dad’s, it just didn’t matter. My brother is much older as well, he had already had his freedom, and I think I was kind of piggybacking off the fact that they were loose with him, so they were loose with me. I just got to do my thing.”

Semenuk and his fiancée, have been together for five years and are set to be married later this year. This is not a topic Semenuk would like to discuss for this story. “I’d rather just keep my personal life personal,” he says. “I put out the things that I want to show people.”

Piloting a WRX STI for Subaru Motorsports, aided by a navigator in the passenger seat, Semenuk has spent the 2022 ARA season in a neck-and-neck battle with motocross legend Travis Pastrana. At the time of this magazine going to press, and with three events remaining, he leads the overall driver championship. After signing with Subaru in spring 2020, Semenuk finished second overall that year and third in 2021, but he has yet to win a series title. For someone who is “inspired by new things all the time”, it’s tempting to guess where his interest lies.

Asked whether he feels compelled to be at his sponsor’s flagship mountain-bike event to defend his title, Semenuk deflects the notion. “I wouldn’t say there’s pressure,” he remarks. “I’m sure they’d like me there, like a lot of people. But a lot of people would like me at the other thing. How many more years am I realistically going to do Rampage? If I didn’t do it this year, I could always go back next year.” (Despite such hedging, Semenuk’s name was there when Red Bull announced the confirmed slate of riders for Rampage in late August.)

If it’s hard to wrap one’s head around Semenuk’s rise to prominence in rally car racing, it’s informative to examine his entry into slopestyle MTB. He became a professional because he loved it and his skill level continually improved. The same is true with rally racing. He began doing it for fun, got very good, and then after signing with Subaru it became economically viable – no more renting a rally car and personally insuring it for events.

“I’ve been fortunate to find one thing I really enjoy doing and am successful at; rally is just another thing I’ve been passionate about for a long time,” he says. “After 10-11 years of doing it for pleasure, there was honestly no thought that I’d ever start doing it at a professional level. But, being OCD and always trying to find the limit with things, I was able to progress.”

The ARA organises the biggest rally competitions in the US, but the highest level of rally racing is the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) series. The second tier is World Rally Championship-2 (WRC-2), with races contested on the same courses as WRC, over the same weekends. For Semenuk, contesting races at WRC-2 level is the natural next step, but it’s not so simple. On the 2022 schedule, 10 of the 13 events are being held in Europe, with none in North America. As such, he’s pragmatic about reaching the heights he has in mountain biking.

“I’m never going to be the fastest driver in the world,” he says. “I grew up mountain biking, and it took starting that young to get to where I’m at. Not to say that I can’t be competitive at a world level, like WRC-2. At some point I will do it, just to see how they operate, how the events operate, and how the other drivers perform. It would be a fun experience.”

Semenuk is, of course, fully aware of the dangers of pursuing these perilous twin careers. He’s also not immune to pilot error, acknowledging a broken wrist that required surgery in winter 2020, and a fractured collarbones from earlier in his career. “The last thing I want to do is go into something unprepared, hurt myself, and then not get to enjoy riding my bike for a number of weeks or months,” he said on the Unclicked podcast about the risk of injury. “That’s what honestly scares me more than anything else. I definitely prepare a lot.”

One last thing that’s important to know about Semenuk: he’s been with most of his sponsors for well over a decade now – an anomalyin the action-sports universe. These include Red Bull, Trek, SRAM, RockShox, Troy Lee Designs and Smith Optics.

“I’ve had other opportunities,” he says. “I could’ve maybe made more money elsewhere, but it was always about being in a place that made me happy, I haven’t really been one of those athletes to go fishing around for money.”

In line with the mythology surrounding his image, Semenuk’s approach to social media is to only post high-quality riding images and videos – nothing personal, and only when he has the time. Where the social accounts of many athletes feel like endless streams of self-promotion and sponsor activation. Semenuk’s Instagram account, which has more than 640,000 followers, features no selfies or impromptu smartphone videos, no gratuitous sponsorship-appreciation posts; captions are often just a few words.

Semenuk bristles at the suggestion that infrequent and impersonal posts might be the luxury of being the world’s greatest MTB rider, and that he doesn’t need to promote his sponsors like other athletes. “I could take the easy route and constantly feed people things, but I don’t want to do that,” he says. “Obviously, it’s down to [sponsors] trusting me to create my worth for them. But, at the same time, this is a passion. If I start doing it in a way where I’m not gonna love it, then it’s not worth it to me any more. I’m not gonna risk my life if I’m not super-down for it.”

Ask anyone and questions about his commitment to “the job” are easily countered. “He’s the hardest working dude I’ve ever met,” says Howard. “We’ll ride in the morning, he’ll rip emails for two or three hours, we’ll ride again in the evening, then he’ll do emails until midnight. He’s passionate about it, but it’s also his job. He wants to be the best. I’m like, ‘Dude, relax, you should be enjoying your lifestyle.’”

And where does Semenuk see this lifestyle taking him? How many more times will he hurl his body down a sandstone cliff in Utah? Does he have a vision for the next chapter of his career?

“Not really,” he says. “I have goals and aspirations, but I also just work with the opportunities I’m given.” The reply is characteristically opaque. Once again, if answering that question could help in his progression, maybe he’d have answered differently. But it won’t, so he doesn’t.

“For me, it’s always just been evolving with my riding. And exploring – exploring mountain biking,” he remarks. “That’s just part of the idea of making it feel like art. If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it in the best possible way.”

Instagram: @brandonsemenuk