Who picks the three riders? Do you have to listen to other people, or is it really your call?
No, it was completely my call. At the beginning of it all I had to run the names by Marilyn. When I did make the call I had to get her okay, which was a tad silly because the CMA doesn’t really follow the racing or know most of the guys. It doesn’t sound like they’re really involved much anymore, so it was totally on me. I basically went with the three best guys on paper that Canada had to offer this year. Colton [Facciotti] was a guarantee. And the only other guy I had to choose from other than Kaven [Benoit] and Tyler [Medaglia] was Shawn Maffenbeier. Kaven won the MX2 title, and he had experience. It was my first time, so I went with the experience on that one. 

What is the budget for sending a smaller team like Canada to the Motocross des Nations?
To do what I did this year in Latvia—I’m just tallying everything up over the last couple days, I still have a few more bills to pay—I think I’m going to spend $42,000-$44,000. I would say $45,000 for our country budget, and that leaves probably about $3,000-$5,000 of room. I covered all the food and all those kind of things. I probably spent 2,000-ish Euro on that stuff. 

What does the sanctioning body help out with? I know the AMA, when I was on the team in 2003, they paid for one room and one flight for a mechanic and one flight for a rider. What did the Canadian guys do?
Zero. They entered our team. 

So 100 percent of the money was up to you to get?
One hundred percent of the money was for me to get, other than the 2,440 Euro from Youthstream that you get for entering a team. 

Shipping was the biggest cost?
Yeah, shipping was about $11,000.

I think—and you would probably agree with me as a former racer—having your own bikes there is the only way to go.
Yeah, 100 percent. A couple conversations came up about having two bikes instead of just a bike with all the spare parts that we brought, or planned to bring. In the beginning of this, I didn’t know how much room I was allowed to pack and ship and if it goes over on cost and size. I was originally was just doing bikes and kind of doing it the Canadian way, hopefully show up. I didn’t think I’d be able to get the budget that I was able to get. So I figured a bike and sort of shot in the dark is how we’re going to have to attack this thing and we’ll just show up and make it work. Fortunately, with the help of a company called Continental Machining, a guy with the crates, we were able to bring the extra motors and all that stuff, but I think two bikes would’ve been better.

Yeah the USA had two bikes and the guys switched off.
I didn’t really realize how close the motos are; they’re just bang, bang, bang. So if you wreck the bike and you have to use that other one, there’s no time to change the motor or nothing. It was like twenty minutes! It was crazy. 

If you do it again, you’d try to raise a little bit more money to ship two bikes?
Well I think I’d get a third crate, which would probably put the shipping up to about $15,000-$17,000.

How much were your hotel costs? How much did that run you?
Just under 5,500 Canadian. 

How do you get that CEC KTM truck that you worked out of? How does that come together?
Actually Carl was the one that set that up last year in Germany. He met this guy Martin, who is a Parts Europe rep from Estonia. Super good buddies with Tanel Leok. They got to talking when they were in Germany and sort of stayed in touch, and when Carl passed the torch I hooked up with this guy and he fully set everything up. And we never talked once on the phone. It was all over email from start to finish. I was crapping my pants hoping he’d show up but everything he said he would do he lived up to.

That’s a big help, having that rig, having that home base. You paid 3,000 Euros for that? They delivered the truck, they had a little bit of a support staff, and some food, right? That was basically the deal?
Yeah, support staff, food. The guys could sit upstairs; they stored the bikes and the awning. It was pretty legit, I thought. We didn’t have to bring any of our tools or anything like that. They supplied all the tools and all that. The boys brought fanny packs full of their stuff that they wanted. But everything else was all their tools and setup and air guns and all that nonsense. 

So you get to Europe and you have to find a practice track, right? How do you do that? How do you transport the bikes? Where do the bikes get shipped and all that stuff?
They went from Canadian Customs at Air Canada cargo all the way over to, I think it had to go to Denmark first, something like that, and then up to Riga. We had a problem in customs because the Canadian Customs guys actually didn’t fill out five or six pieces of paper on my Carnet, which is basically a huge list of everything you bring. So the Latvian customs couldn't even understand how these crates got let out of Canada. And then they’re laying in the customs warehouse. I’m like twenty feet away and I can’t have them.

I rented sprinters. Martin once again hooked that up. I got one Sprinter van—and they called it a carrier or something—and an airbus, which is like a VW minivan with eight seats. Then the place that was going to store, or where I had to go back and drop it off to put it on the boat this week, the girl from the custom thing fully looked after me, got another Sprinter to come over to the customs thing. Picked up both crates, took them to their warehouse where they were going to leave after the event—they’re still there now; I’m going to leave Sunday—on the boat. And they let us use that. We went in there and built the bikes and put it all in. Loaded everything we brought on the one Sprinter.

How do you find a practice track?
So the guy at CCIS Racing, he comes and meets me. Martin set it up with that guy. His name’s Ivo Steinberg. We get a call from the dude of that track that was right by Kegums there. We were going to go there, but America, Australia, and Deano were there, and we weren’t allowed to go there because they had rented the track and I guess we weren’t renting it for enough money. So we got turned down there and Ivo had his own personal track right in his backyard. The track was unbelievable. The boys were pumped, all of them were like, “This is the best track we’ve ever had.” So we definitely got a little lucky that way.

But then you got a little unlucky because Tyler blew a motor that day. You had no room to spare.
So there’s the two-bikes thing. If that had happened in the first moto we would have been screwed for the second moto. 

When you got to the race, how was Youthstream to deal with? How was all that kind of stuff?
Absolute butter from top to bottom. Had the list of passes for the thing at the front at the welcome office. Everything was easy to pay for. If I wanted to buy extra ones, I got some extra ones for some Canadian guys that came. Just buy them, you pay cash, put it in an envelope. Up to where they did the draw for the starting gates and everything. I talked with Wolfgang Srb for about thirty minutes about Canada and CMA, so he was super approachable. It was mint. Not one problem. The dude who did sound check, after like our fourth or fifth time with Kaven’s bike, he’s like, “Hey man, just get it to 114.5, 114.6 and we’ll get you going.” One-fourteen was the pass. Everybody’s just pretty approachable and open, it seems. 

What was the biggest problem you had as a manager over the weekend at the races? Was there one?
I think the only problem was probably myself. Just when sound check took forever and I was not sure the gate pick and the times of everything. Trying to keep the riders moving around and everybody...even you were bugging me under the tent; I think I stressed myself out more than anything. The boys were all jokesters too, so they were able to kind of feed off that where I got kind of pissed off a couple times because I was trying to be serious and whatnot. But everything worked out in the end, so all the semi-stress didn’t need to happen, but again it was my first time there really, so I just wanted everything to be working and end up talking to the right people. I didn’t really have one problem at all.

How was the strategy? You, Digger [Derek Shuster, assistant team manager], and the riders as far as gate pick? How’d you guys decide that?
At the beginning I was going to make the decision that each guy gets a chance at the inside gate. We had fourteenth pick, which was a pretty solid pick on that gate. First moto we were going to go with that. Kaven was going to take his first good gate pick and put Colt on the outside. And then I got up to the start gate and I’m looking around. I’m like, “Man, every one of these MX1 guys is up front.” I talked to Colton, I’m like, “Honestly, tell me do you think you can get better than a top ten in this moto?” He’s like, “I don’t know.” I’m like, “Look, I think you can. I’m going to give you a chance.” You got to get a start with these guys. There were like six or seven MX1 bikes and then a bunch of MX2s.

JT and I were joking about how you were celebrating a little too much when you guys made the A main. But there was sort of that B main thing hanging over you after last year, right? As it turned out, Canada easily made it, but there was a little bit of pressure there.
One hundred percent. I believe the only reason why celebratory efforts happen, as good as they were going for guys to crack a few jokes, is because all three motos we had sort of bad luck which took away our good chance of being impressive. Tyler went to twenty-seventh in his first moto but with that start if he didn’t have any problems you had to go fifteen to twenty. And then Colton runs into Dungey. If he doesn’t do that he gets a sixteenth again. So there was like 40 points right there off our score, which would have dropped us to like thirteenth or something.

I think Canada should be ten to fifteen every year.
We were all under the thing at the hotel. I gave a talk. I’m like, “Look boys, let’s go and try to enjoy ourselves tonight, have some fun.” But we also know this is not how we’re showing. We’re better than this. You’re going to have to answer questions about this. I was definitely stoked to get past that B final hump. We’ve never belonged there, ever. It was definitely nice. The simple fan, it looks good for them.

Did everyone get along?
One of the best trips, as far as that’s concerned, that I’ve ever been on. Everybody bonded. Lots of joking, lots of poking fun. Tyler was really good to have on the trip. He sort of always had something funny or something good to share where it would make everybody laugh, and then it would extend more down the line with other stories and memories and all that kind of stuff. It was good. Justin and Jerome and Steph are super quiet, the mechanic guys. They really didn’t poke too much fun.

At the end of the day you raised enough money to cover everything?
For sure, 100 percent.

Will you be taking a little bit for yourself, for your work and your effort? I think you should.
I sort of planned that way to make it work that way. It looks like basically once I get that CMA check, that will be my bonus. It’ll be about 3,000 Canadian. That’ll be mine if I want it or if I want to put 1,000 in my pocket and the rest for next year. That’s my money to use for what I want with. It never cost me anything other than my time.

How much time do you think you put into getting Team Canada to the MXoN?
I started in February, so that’s eight months. I would say twenty hours a month maybe? Obviously, when it got closer to crunch time, it was a lot more on the phone and stuff like that compared to back in February. If I put 150 hours into it, that’s probably safe to say.