The past and the status before the event: A military landing strip somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Finnland, about 10.000 spectators, mostly of a “Hardcore-Biker” breed, accompaigning Drag-Racing and a lot of Parties with no more than three hours of darkness per day are building the framework of today’s championship round, in which I am in promising position:

After having won rounds one and two in Assle (NED) and Kaposvar (HUN), I’ll have to end up as bad as fifth and would still go home with the title. In matters of other contestants I am facing Hungarian Rookie Rider Zoltan Angyal and legendary A.C Farias from Brazil, but me toughest competitor, Humberto Ribeiro from Portugal, obviously gave up on the championships before this event, he decided to not even do the long drive up to here.

But I would not have made it that far with safety-runs, so also for this event, the principle of going flatout will come into place. No matter what the judging demands, I want and will try to rock the crowd with pulling off a phat and dynamic Chris Pfeiffer show for the fans on the grandstands. That should do for the event’s podium, securing the European Champion title at the same time.

The qualification, Friday, June 9: At rather average weather conditions and pretty colde temperatures, something, they still call summer up here, the qualification got underway, while at the main-strip, loads of Turbo Hayabusas and NOS GSXRs were dragracing each other throughout the day.

Again, I’ve had to go through a compulsory part, containing a wheelie over 100 meters, to be performed as slow as possible, a stoppie to be as long as possible after a limited in-run of 40 meters and as many donuts as possible around a pillone within 10m seconds each: clockwise and counter-clockwise. All that’s been missing in this part to comply with figure skating were the short skirts ;-)) ... Anyway, right after this compulsory part, there were two minutes of freestyle to be shown and the actual sport could finally begin. I tried to ride as compact as possible, show smooth trick-combos and get the crowd an idea of my flow. The props received right after my run  seemed like the crowd and the other riders have liked what I’ve been showing, but due to the fact that I’ve been missing out in some of the compulsory exercises, I ended up on first place together with Zoltan Angyal with exactly the same ammount of points ...

This is just fine for me, since the points will be added up to what comes in the next two heats (semi-finals and finals with no more compulsory fighure skating stuff, but 4 and 8 minutes of pure street freestyle) in order to determine the winner of this event.

All in all a great base for those two more heats to come.

The big final day: In the first round of today’s finals, we were given no more than four minutes performing-time. Not too much, given the big bag of tricks i am carrying. On the other hand, four minutes are a great timeframe to fire off as many tricks and combos as possible before getting tired or needing the long straights to recover. It seemed like this rapid-fire strategy turned out well, not only could I win this first round, I also managed to increase my lead over Zoltan Angyal for valuable 17 points before the last round.

In this very last “Superfinal” of the top 12 guys we were finally given (sufficient) eight minutes of riding time, and even though I consider myself of having the deepest tricks-repertoire of all competitors, I somehow managed to loser my rhythm and many of my current favorite tricks simply did not come up onto my monitor during the run. When the ideas re-appeared, I’ve already been close to the black flag: Time-out. Even though the rather decent finnish crowd (at that time of the day, at least) went nuts with what I showed, I personally did not feel too happy about my performance in the last run of the day. However, it’s been enough! First for another Event-Victory, but most of all:

I am European Stunt Riding Champion 2006! Yesss! I claim to have made it in a quite impressive way by winning all three of the three rounds total.

But way more important than that: Even though our sport is still under-represented in matters of contests, this year’s series has brought up promising young talent, served the sport by quite fair judging (as fair as judging in any freesport can generally be ;-)) and has been another step in the right direction. I hope that this devellopment keeps going and the coming-up potential get through. Even if noone is ever going to believe me: The evolution only works with young blood, well adminstered, widely communicated, credible contests, and also the few established riders of today (I consider myself as one of them) can push themselves to new levels thanks to those challenges. Winner is and remains our sport: Stunt Riding ... it’s alive and kicking!