Robin Goos dropped into the Utah desert with a microphone clipped to her helmet and a line she had changed at the last minute, and she came out the other side as the first back-to-back women’s champion in Red Bull Rampage history. For 25 years, this patch of cliffs outside Virgin, Utah has been the sport’s most unforgiving proving ground, a place where one wrong calculation ends in rock and consequence rather than glory. The event did not begin with champions. It began with a handful of riders trying to make it down the hill in one piece.
When making it to the bottom was the whole point
In 2001, Wade Simmons rode into history without a script. The man later dubbed the godfather of freeride earned the inaugural title with a score of 78.4, in a year when surviving the descent was itself a statement. Tyler ‘Super T’ Classen followed in year two at just 20 years old, hunting the biggest cliff nobody else would touch. By 2003, Frenchman Cedric Gracia arrived with World Cup racing speed and introduced rotations as a scoring factor, turning a survival contest into something closer to choreography.
Then came Kyle Strait, 17 years old in 2004, winning with a style and speed that felt absurd for his age. After a three-year hiatus, the event returned and handed another teenager the crown: Brandon Semenuk, who would go on to define what Rampage could look like at its highest register. Cameron Zink changed the conversation in 2008 with a 360 off a drop so large the commentators could barely finish their sentences. ‘Holy mother, trucker,’ one of them said, and that about covered it.
The runs that kept raising the ceiling
Curt Sorgi brought back-to-back ambition and delivered, building double drops where others rode single ones and stacking no-handers on features that gave no business being trickable. Brett Reer arrived at successive Rampages with a barely-contained hunger, tail-whipping long step-down gaps at speeds that seemed to rule out the physics. Andreo Lacandigi, 25 years old and out of Barcelona, posted a 95.25 in 2014 that briefly looked untouchable.
Semenuk kept returning. He invented the tailwind off a flat drop, the first in Rampage history, and then, later, landed a backflip tailwhip to pedals that left the commentary booth speechless. He waited the longest anyone had ever waited in the gate at a Rampage and then stomped a complete top-to-bottom anyway. He was, as the broadcast put it, ‘unapologetically selective’ about where he competed, which made every appearance feel like a deliberate act.
Zink came back a decade after his original 360 sender, recreated the iconic moment on the same feature, and celebrated at the bottom with his family.
The moment that changed who Rampage belongs to
Robin Goos, 28, from New Zealand, became the first woman ever to drop in at Red Bull Rampage. She talked to herself throughout the run, mic open, landing backflips on features that would end most riders’ days. She went top-to-bottom, flipped the final jump, and left the announcing team stunned. Then she came back as defending champion, changed her line at the last minute on race day, and did it again: backflip, no-hander, a small crank flip mid-run, and something large at the bottom that sent the crowd into full noise.
Rookie Hayden Zablatney, out of Vernon, British Columbia, made his own mark by pulling a knack-knack where he had crashed in run one, buying himself enough runway to complete the run. He had said the day before: ‘I’m just out here so grateful to finally be at Rampage. I’m digging trails and I’m having fun.’
The microphone that stayed open to the end
Robin Goos finished her second championship run with the mic still live, her voice audible over the crowd noise coming off the canyon walls.
Twenty-five years after Wade Simmons collected a score of 78.4 just for making it to the bottom, the desert outside Virgin, Utah handed a back-to-back title to the first woman who ever dropped in, and the crowd noise echoing off those same cliffs was the loudest it had been all day.
