Hello, my name is Vinnie Janssens, born on the 20th of September 1994 in Antwerp, Belgium. I am a freestyle MTB athlete in the category ‘Dirt and Slopestyle’.

The drive that sent me to the MTB scene, truly began to blossom around 2009. I can still vividly remember how I, as a 13-year-old boy, came home from school and secretly went and watched Freecaster, X-treme Sports; Drop in TV and UCI Nissan 4cross until my parents came home and I got yelled at again because I was not allowed to watch TV straight after I got home from school.

From that point on, my life was slowly but surely taken over by the MTB scene. About a year later, give to take a couple of months, my father urged me to purchase a Cross Country Mountain bike. It soon became clear to me that Cross Country was not what I wanted to do. “I want to jump” just like they did on Drop in TV. With this in mind, I went on the internet looking for a Downhill Mountain bike, in the hope that this is what I was really looking for and what could satisfy me.
 
Fate clearly had something else in store for me, and made sure I bumped into an old classmate of mine whose  hobby was Freestyle Mountain biking. After briefly talking to him, he advised me to buy a Freestyle Mountain bike instead of a Downhill one.

All this led to me buying my first real Freestyle Mountain bike in May 2011. I could finally “jump” like they did on TV and started to ride in the forest of Schinnen. Shortly after that I came in contact with “Team Solid”, a group of riders in the Freestyle MTB scene. I looked up to them, I wanted to be part of their team at all costs. This motivated me to be better, they motivated me to be better. My passion for the sport became even bigger than before: it gave me an enormous boost.

Soon enough I was able to ride jumps. It was certainly not easy. I had a lot of crashes, a lot of trial and error, but my determination kept me going. That all led to the point where I was allowed to call myself a member of Team Solid.

Beside the forest, I also went riding on the local “illegal” spot, that Team Solid had called their home turf. Unfortunately that quickly came to an end after a bad crash of a local rider there. The spot was discovered by the owner of the piece of land we had the jumps built on, which led to him banning people from riding on it and then demolishing it.

This problem pushed me into taking own initiative, so I went and contacted the municipality of Sittard-Geleen. We needed a new spot, and I would do everything to achieve that.

After about  9 months, the time had finally arrived; everything that was needed had been arranged. We had no less than 2400m2 at our disposal to build a bike park. We went straight to work, and in no time, we converted what was once a blank canvas into a complete bike park.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. I was bit-by-bit omitted from the team. Team Solid fell apart, and I as one of the last remaining riders in Limburg that still continued with his “hobby”, was suddenly left all alone to take care of the park. Eventually after some time, I decided to stop running the bike park and started to focus on the bigger picture: “I, myself”. All my time that was previously spent into the bike park was converted into traveling to different places outside my area to improve myself. I started to think about who I was, what I wanted and what my purpose actually was. Those thoughts and my desire for improvement kept growing and growing. I realized that I wanted to focus on being different, and to create my own style in riding. I wanted to be unique in a recognizable way. I wanted to make a name for myself. All that led to the pursuit of wanting to ride contests and eventually my big dream, to become part of a freestyle show family.