FreestyleXtreme Magazine Issue 10 | Page 52

This year Tom Pagès came painfully close to
matching Nate Adams’ record of being the
only rider to win two Red Bull X-Fighters World
Tour Championships. The 2013 champ went
into the final round tied in the points’ race with
his friend Clinton Moore.
When you hear Tom speak in interviews at the
end of a season, you will always hear him say
the same thing: ‘I’m going to come back next
year with new tricks’. When Tom says ‘new
tricks’, he doesn’t mean adding little variations
to existing tricks or learning a trick someone
else is already doing. He means completely
new tricks that have never been seen before.
And it seems the Frenchman is a man of his
word.

© NAIM CHIDIAC / RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Tom cares more
about the sport of
FMX than personal
glory

Now of course Tom wants to win. The DC
rider is probably the hardest working FMX
rider in the world. You only have to look at the
expression on his face after this year’s final
to see that winning is obviously a huge deal
to him.
“My feeling is a little bit weird right now.
Second place in the world tour is a great
result, but that was not the reason why I came
here,” Tom explained after the UAE final. “I am
disappointed that I made another mistake and
could not put a whole run together. I had a lot
of pressure before coming here and did a lot
of work at home to win this competition, but in
my eyes achieved nothing tonight. It is hard to
do a trick like that perfectly every single time.
With these tricks it is all or nothing.”
The fact that Tom is not prepared to win by
doing the same tricks as everyone else is
what sets him apart. He includes his most
inconsistent and risky tricks into every run,
and is prepared to pay the consequence of
the smallest mistake. The progression of FMX
and winning on his terms, with his own tricks,
seems to be at the forefront of Tom’s agenda.
This is what FMX is all about, and the reason
Tom is one of the biggest legends freestyle
motocross has ever seen.

© JÖRG MITTER / RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Tom decided some years ago now that he
wasn’t going to do Backflip tricks, as he felt
they were essentially pretty easy and being
done by every rider in the field. Before this
move, Tom had some of the biggest Backflip
tricks in the game, including arguably the
biggest Cliffhanger Flip of all time, as well as
huge Double Grab Flips.

© NAIM CHIDIAC / RED BULL CONTENT POOL

The two big tricks that Tom brought to the
table in 2015 were the Alley-Oop Flair and
the Bike Flip. Both tricks are unbelievably
technical and have minute margins of error.