What Surrey resident Anthony Messere does for a living looks insane to many people. The 20-year-old pro freeride mountain bike rider has been known to fly up to 12 metres into the air as he does a 360-degree spin on his bike.

It’s such a complicated move that Messere had trouble describing it in a phone interview with the Georgia Straight. And he’s been doing that trick, called the flat spin, for seven years.

So does Messere ever feel fear before soaring so high in the air?

“Yeah, absolutely,” he replied. “We don’t go for things we don’t know—that we haven’t practised and gone through the steps of learning. But there’s always that fear when you’re going for something that is difficult.”

Messere is part of a generation of younger mountain bikers who’ve learned slopestyle with the help of giant airbags, which cushion their falls during practice. It has helped them learn increasingly brazen tricks in a competition that combines traditional downhill freeriding with dirt jumping and BMX-style tricks.

According to Messere, the newest crash pads can be placed on landing ramps, where accidents commonly occur.

“If you land on your head, it’s no good,” the freerider said with considerable understatement. “That’s where the airbags and the foam pits really make a difference.”

Messere, winner of the 2014 Crankworx Les Deux Alpes slopestyle event, will compete in the Red Bull Joyride later this month. It’s the marquee attraction at Crankworx Whistler, which takes place in the resort from Thursday to next Sunday (August 11 to 21).

For Messere, it will be a return to familiar turf. In 2011, he came third in the Red Bull Joyride, which was his first freeriding event. And his introduction to the sport came five years before that, when his dad showed him a video of one of the earliest Crankworx events.

“Being in front of a home crowd makes it easier for me,” Messere said. “It’s not as nerve-racking. I’ve been going to Whistler since I was a little kid.”

At the same time, he acknowledged that the Red Bull Joyride attracts enormous crowds. And he believes that there may be more mountain bikers in Whistler during Crankworx than anywhere else on the planet at any given time.

Of course, there’s another sporting event taking place that eclipses Crankworx: the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. And for now, slopestyle mountain biking is not an Olympic sport.

But Messere hasn’t discounted the possibility of this changing in the future. Slopestyle snowboarding has become a hit in the Winter Games, and skateboarding will be part of the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo.

“I think action sports as a whole should be in the Olympics,” Messere said. “The Olympics is showcasing what’s possible. That’s exactly what slopestyle is.”

The Red Bull Joyride takes place in Whistler next Sunday (August 21).