A little while ago, I ran across a post on a website that had a height-to-size chart of the 2012 Demo 8 and I saw that the size of bike that I was riding was way too small. A medium frame is suppose to work for a rider who was up to 5’11” and not me who’s around 6’2″. I thought about this for a while and realized that a longer bike would help with stability at high speeds and help me not be so “over the bars”. I sort of started looking for a larger bike on the Buy and Sell page of Pinkbike. My brother actually sent me a link to a Commencal race bike which I had researched a little bit. I messaged the owner asking about sizes and when I could possibly take a look at the bike.
Kyle Sangers
On Friday, I went to look at it. A Commencal Supreme DH World Cup. Pretty long name, eh? The person selling it and he told me he was the owner/manager of Perform X Racing. Little did I know that the bike that I would be looking at would be used by Kyle Sanger on two UCI Downhill World Cup races.
I went to parking lot 4 here in Whistler on a rainy and cold friday and connected with Todd Schumlick, who I had previously read about in an article on Pinkbike. I didn’t recognize him at first and only did because he talked about that article. He pulled the beautiful looking bike out of his van and proceeded to tell me pretty much EVERYTHING about it, which was good. I asked some questions about the bike and about his team and I told him I’d talk to my dad about the bike when he came up from Vancouver that night. Surprisingly when I talked with my Dad, he said we should go for it (which made me very happy and unable to sleep that night). We stopped by the bank on the way to Pemberton early Saturday morning to go and meet Todd at his house. After a couple hours of very helpful advise and conversation (enough to fill an entire blog post), we walked away with the bike, as well as extra parts.
We made the drive back to Whistler and started to move all of the parts off of my brother’s bike to my Demo which he is now using. The process, I thought, would only take a couple of hours. We ended up being in the underground parking garage for over 6 hours swapping parts, bleeding brakes, and setting up the bikes. We had a small collection of tools in our apartment that we used, but my Dad had to make around 7 or 8 trips to the trailer on the other side of the village for parts and tools that we needed. Luckily, he saw this as exercise and didn’t mind it. After bleeding the new Saint Brakes and changing out the expensive and super tacky Schwalbe race tires with Maxxis Minions, the new bike was finished.
