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About 15 years ago, mountain biker Richie Schley made a prediction so bold that his industry laughed.

He told BIKE magazine that in the future, people would ride bike parks like skiers and snowboarders ride hills – a statement so far-fetched that the bible of mountain biking nominated it among its most ridiculous quotes of the year.

Today, however, Schley is visionary.

“It was a concept I had and always wanted to see happen,” the 41-year-old Whistler resident said. “It makes me feel like I did contribute something.”

Schley, Wade Simmons, 36, and Brett Tippie, 41, the so-called “Fro Riders,” will be inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in Crested Butte, Colo., this September. The pioneering Canadian trio is responsible for “freeriding,” extreme disciplines of mountain biking, some featuring nervy athletes performing big-air tricks down a mountain side.

If skateboarding has its “Dogtown,” the area of Santa Monica where California teens revolutionized the sport, than its freeriding equivalent is the sand shoots and gravel pits in Kamloops, where the Fro Riders began trailblazing in the early-1990s. Around the same time, adrenaline junkies in North Vancouver were barrelling down hiking trails, carving new lines through the woods and jumping off rock faces on the North Shore Mountains.

“We’d be driving around looking for trails,” said Simmons, who was involved in both scenes. “It was a way to get your thrills, and see where you could ride your bike. But we didn’t foresee it getting this big.”

This week, the seventh annual Crankworx festival in Whistler has attracted the top international freeride competitors, as well as recreational riders and spectators. More than 20,000 are expected to huddle at the bottom of the mountain Saturday for the slopestyle competition, the signature event of the nine-day festival.

This made-in-B.C. sport is now part of provincial culture, yet has gone global in reach. Whistler has become the epicentre after opening its chair lifts to freeriders more than a decade ago, and Whistler-Blackcomb’s vice-president of business development Rob McSkimming has been named its most influential person.

“B.C. is a mountain biker’s paradise,” Tippie said. “It’s called mountain biking for a reason. We have wicked mountains, and we’re mountain people.”

In 1999, Schley and others told Whistler-Blackcomb that the Whistler Mountain Bike Park was boring and needed to be overhauled with jumps and bumps where users could get bigger thrills, and flash their aerial artistry. Meanwhile, trail designer Dave Kelly was lobbying for excavation equipment to carve into the terrain, and create never-before-seen runs that would challenge the best and bravest.

A year later, Kelly completed “B-Line,” a revolutionary descent that can be compared to the curved stick in hockey, or the forward pass in football. By 2003, he finished the bigger, badder “A-Line,” now the most popular mountain bike trail in the world.

“The minute we finished B-Line, we knew what we needed to build,” Kelly said. “On it own, it wasn’t going to attract the masses, so we came up with A-Line.”

The Fro Riders had BMX backgrounds; and were professional snowboarders and skiers. They were also adept at photography and video, so when they began chronicling their new-found hobby, the industry took notice.

“[Cycling] was a very race-oriented sport, but at the same time, you had snowboarding that was all about style,” Schley said. “We were all skiers and snowboarders, and in the summer, we were junkies. It was about trying to fulfill that addiction.”

Soon thereafter, BIKE Magazine wrote that B.C.’s riders did it “wilder and steeper than anyone on the planet.” Producer Greg Stump, known for his ski films, featured the Fro Riders in his 1995 production Pulp Traction, while two years later, Squamish, B.C. filmmaker Christian Begin made Kranked, the first of three films on the sport.

The promotion increased the sport’s reach and sophistication. Athletes now perform 360-degree spins and flips off 20-foot drops, and have been called “storm troopers” for their head-to-toe padding.

“Happiness outweighs the injuries,” Simmons said. “We’ve created something that most people can enjoy, and that’s our job: get people onto bikes. When people come up to me and say I got them into riding, it makes my day as much as a great ride.”