When you send men to war you need big numbers, basic math will tell you that an army of 5,000 will defeat an army of 1,000 and I’ve seen enough Game of Thrones to understand how this works. If I send 2 riders on a trip then I’m basically playing risk, because sending two riders to war with a pile of concrete could go either way. There’s no back up if one goes down.

Doing a trip with 9 riders brings up various good point and bad points, as every TM will know you have to balance things so they work in the interest of the video or the vibe of the crew, there’s so many variants it can be stressful. With 9 riders you have to decide the right amount of days, somewhere around 12 days is perfect in my opinion, any more and bodies start to fall apart, anything less and there’s not enough time for all the riders to get enough clips. We went in for 11 days but we hired the camera skills of Dan Coller to make sure we were on top of everything and Zach didn’t feel the pressure of a hefty line of riders waiting for the next opportunity to film. Having 2 filmers suddenly felt like time was never wasted, someone was always filming something somewhere. Of course with a crew this big, we had to hire two apartments in downtown Montreal to accommodate the 12, every meal was like the last supper basically.

Every trip you organise is always a risk, when you look at it in the flesh you are sending stunt men on stunt bikes into battle with concrete and expecting them all to come back in one piece. For Mount Royal we sent in 9 men, 1 went down on the first day, another got struck off mid trip and one sent himself head first into the concrete from up in the sky and is only just getting back to riding now. Look out for Mount Royal next month on the visual battle fields of the internet; it’s a war that we won in numbers.