INTERVIEW: BIKE PARK
WALES DIRECTOR ROWAN
SORRELL
Hey Rowan. Who are you and what’s your
background in mountain biking?
I’m Rowan Sorrell. I’m a Director at Bike Park
Wales and one of its founders. I’m in charge
of the trail development at the Bike Park.
I started racing downhill back in 1996 and
my first race was just as stone’s throw from
Bike Park Wales at Aberdare. I got into
racing in a big way through to 2007 and
raced World Cups. A few years back I started
my own trail building company called Back
On Track and I build mountain bike trails
professionally.
What made you guys decide to open a
Bike Park?
It was a combination of previous experience
as a rider and my trail building. I’d seen what
the UK was missing and had done a lot of
travelling to ride tracks overseas.
I’d go and build a trail in the UK and be
proud of the job and then revisit it two years
later and be really disheartened that it hadn’t
been looked after and had degraded. We
wanted to build something that would be
better every time you visited it, not just built
and then left to get steadily worse.
We also felt there was an opportunity to do
something different, to target a different style
of riding and a w