I turned up to dig jumps in exchange for riding. Ten years later I was one of the people running the place.
La Poma opened in 2005, the same year I started XAI. I was there from the first day, volunteering. Digging and maintaining jumps, helping at events, in exchange for riding. I also designed its first logo, which to be honest, was very ugly.
I kept that up for years, through design school and bikeshops and Barcelona. Then tattooing took over for a while and I stepped back.
Around 2015 they called and asked if I could help at weekends. That slowly turned into a full-time job as I was asked to come more often, more days. And then, with a few colleagues, into founding La Poma Builders, the company that took over running the park. The riders and the workers ended up looking after the place they used.
Communication, marketing and graphic design. Sponsorship: finding partners, doing the work of convincing brands to help us, and keeping them happy once they did. The website, the social channels, the print, the event branding. And managing a small team of two at the entrance, selling day tickets and food.
It was a small company, so nobody had one job.
If you want a company to put money into a bikepark, you have to be able to explain what they're buying. Same goes for a town council, or a regional grant.
I didn't design these. My part was asking for them to be made and providing what went in them: the numbers, the photos, the press. We hired designers to build them. Most of the time I was too busy running things to be doing the drawing myself.
The dossier ran to twenty-two pages. The deck we took to Eurobike was in English.
Happy Ride existed before we took the park over. We kept making it bigger.
By the end it was bringing nearly 200 competitors from more than 25 countries and around 5,000 spectators over a single weekend. Andreu Lacondeguy, Thomas Genon, Martin Söderström, Sam Reynolds, Yannick Granieri, Sergio Layos, Thomas Lemoine. It ran into the night, it was streamed, and it had a tech team, a crew and a budget.
I made the deck we took to Eurobike to sell it.
The event and the famous riders were the loud part, but the park ran on the quiet one: a bike school, summer camps, family sessions, national teams training, and people who had never ridden a jump in their life.
That mix is why 20,000 people came through in a year, and it's what the sponsorship argument was actually built on.
La Poma Builders didn't only run the park. We designed and built dirt jumps, pump tracks and race tracks elsewhere: for Sea Otter Europe, for the Vallnord World Cup, for Red Bull projects, and for town councils putting a track in for their kids.
Same skill, different client. It also meant the park wasn't the only thing paying the wages.
It built a community. And it made the town council understand what the space we'd all made actually was. Enough that the region noticed too, and public money came in to keep it growing, because by then the park was an economic motor for the area.
The council paid to build a skatepark inside the bikepark, so other sports could come in as guests and users too.
GMBN put La Poma in its top five bike parks in the world and Red Bull filmed there. But the part I'd point at is a council coming to treat a field full of dirt jumps as infrastructure worth funding.
I left in 2019. I wanted to move to Canada, and I'd done what I could there.
None of it was mine alone. It was a team, and before that a crowd of volunteers with shovels. What was mine was the communication: how the place explained itself, who it partnered with, and making sure anyone who needed convincing had something in their hands that did it.