BMW GS Trophy 2022, My Attempt and Failure - Issue #22

I first threw a leg over a motorcycle five years ago and for some reason, I thought I was good enough to at least finish top 10. That was ignorant but I learned a lot about myself and further solidified what I believe is my place in this community….

Let’s get the meaty details out of the way first because this one may go long and I know most of you just want the high-level

If I were to build a pie chart of the sort of skills you would need, it would look like this:

Keep in mind though that these challenges are only in place to find the top riders. I won’t get into the scores here or how people were picked for semi-finals but I will say that the scores between people was very tight up until the end and you did not need to excel at every category to be a semi-finalist.

Police bike was very high. In fact, the three professional motorcycle cops in the qualifier made it to the semi-finals. Navigating very tight on-road cone exercises was a challenge that I was not expecting to even be a part of this. The Trophy is off-road and I didn’t practice cones at all on-road. We’re talking tight figure eights, snow man, light-bulbs, slalom with angles that were next to impossible to make (tight slalom), turns within boxes then exits, elephant turns (off-road) and deductions for basically any kind of error you could make. If I wanted to qualifier in 2024, I would become exceptional at slow-speed police-bike maneuvers.

The rough terrain included slaloms up hill, down hill, up a mountain, down a mountain into a 180 degree turn with little to no space to turn, up stairs, through gravel/rocks/sand and balance beams and some single-track up and down hills sideways (as in not straight up and down but riding off-camber around cones then back up a hill with no runway on loose/muddy terrain).

Slow speed balance was a part of every single exercise except the team challenges. There wasn’t a single exercise where you didn’t need to be completely balanced atop your bike both standing & sitting (yes these were rules depending on the exercise)

I assumed physical and mental stamina would be higher but it wasn’t. if you’re healthy and can do woods riding for an hour, you’re healthy enough for this event. That would have been different if this was a typical Labor Day weekend in SC but temps were mid-70s and a nice breeze so I didn’t have to sweat too much. We had a lot of downtime where I’d spend 2 minutes doing a challenge then rest for 10-30 minutes. Stay hydrated and you’ll be fine. The rules weren’t there to trip you up. I took them all literally and I felt I did okay but I later found out there were some unspoken rules that frankly, upset me. I can’t go into detail here but now knowing I had DNFs for rules that I didn’t know existed is pretty frustrating. I spent 4.5 minutes on a steep hill getting my bike picked up and positioned only to find out a few hours later, I probably DNFed that event. I would have just rolled down the hill and let the next guy go if I knew that

My preparations for this event were sparse. I did a lot of hard riding on my bike and that’s it. I thought about the qualifier every time I did something at slow speed off-road. I worked for a few days on slow speed elephant turns, skid-turns and loose-terrain full lock turns.

All I know is that I was not in the top 15. 16th? Probably not. No one in my team made the semi-finals and we were all competent riders. I don’t think it was pandering for Aaron, who runs the BMW US Riders Academy, to say that we were all top riders for even being here. A lot of GS owners were sitting at home while we were trying to qualify for team USA. I didn’t see a single rider who was ‘bad’ or needed a level 1 RawHyde course because they were too afraid to drop their bike or leave pavement. These were all great riders and we were heavily challenged. That is not an exaggeration. A few people who I spoke to that were in the past 3-4 qualifiers as participants or volunteers told me this was the most challenging qualifier they had ever seen. I went into this thinking it was 50% skills and the rest of the qualifier would be made up with style, attitude, perseverance, team work and how well I am on camera. Seriously, this is a BMW Motorrad Marketing event, of course they want people who are good with their team and on camera. Turns out this as entirely skills based which is how it should be so I was wrong in that regards. Not that I acted any differently but throughout the day, when I spent my entire lunch hour on Friday helping a buddy with his steering issues, I figured there’d be a mole who’d see that and grant me a few extra points. I was wrong.

Here’s what I learned at the Qualifier that I didn’t know going into it. I don’t want a free trip to Albania to represent Team USA. There are people who want that badly enough that they practice for over a year all of the skills I lacked and they do extremely well. They usually have other goals, either a life bucket list or they want to gain the notoriety because their livelihood depends on it because they work for a training academy or accessory company and they want to add GS Trophy to their resume. Me, I just want to spend a weekend with like-minded people, ride GS bikes and have a great time but most importantly, I want to capture these events on film.

I had some fantastic conversations with the BMW Contracted Photographer throughout the event. I don’t want to be him but I envied his ability to photograph this event. All I wanted to do at each challenge was run it one time then throw a drone up in the air or run alongside a competitor with my SLR in a gimbal and video-tape their run or grab my SLR from the tank bag (absent for this event) and get a photo of any one of the amazing riders I was surrounded by. The 2 hours after I finished my challenges running around capturing the photos you see here were my favorite moments of the entire event.

If you take a step back and look at my place in the BMW community, I am 1st and foremost a motorcycle rider but, if you look at the bigger picture, I’m a historian and documentarian for this community. I’m on the Vermont & National boards and I help lead rides, organize events, market events and get new riders into our sport but through it all, photos, video, audio are things I create and broadcast and it’s what I love doing. I can leave my house, ride 500 feet and ride off-road all day on my GS or dirt bike. I get to do this kind of riding all of the time. What I can’t do all of the time is be with people who are just like me and capture their smiles and celebrate their successes. This is unique to the events I attend and something I take very seriously.

I don’t want BMW to hire me to be a photographer but I do want to find some way to continue attending events yet be there to capture them from my standpoint. It’s a part of this that I really love. So much that I will sign up for the next qualifier in 2 years and just take photos the entire time if they’ll let me. Knowing that BMW’s photographer will be sending all of his images to BMW and there they will sit in some folder used only for marketing when a lot of participants would love photos of themselves and most will never get to see the entire set of images, it feels criminal. This is a BMW event…they paid for the photographer but those pictures belong to all of us and we’ll never get to see ourselves. I know the photographer was present for me on 3 of my challenges. He has photos of me looking like a bad-ass and falling off my bike…I’ll never see those photos. It sucks knowing they’re out there and in a corporate Sharepoint site locked away.

Who knows, I may also attend the 2024 GS Trophy Qualifier cheering on Heather because she things she’d really like to try her hand at it in 2 years and I will absolutely be there to support her.

This was my first exposure to BMW Corporate as well. They’re a customer of ours @ my day job and I’ve been to the Performance Center and I’ve been heavily involved with the clubs and community that surrounds their motorcycles but attending a corporate event showed me that the GS Trophy exists to sell motorcycles. We were the actors on a stage set to sell GS Bikes to more people and I think the media that comes out of this will work but the amount of people out there who ride with me on GS bikes who don’t know what the GS Trophy is too DAMN high. I want GS Trophy full size banners at every dealer, I want mass email broadcasts going out to GS customers and I want live interviews with the winners on YouTube. I want every single BMW GS owner to know about this event and follow everything live from start to finish covering every qualifier, winner and team from training to the final event next year in Albania. The marketing just feels so sporadic. I love BMW motorcycles and I love the riders in our community of GS Adventure Touring Riders but the Trophy is an amazing event built just for us so BMW can sell more bikes and the amount of work and money that goes into it is very high for so little online activity following it. That’s my opinion as an individual and not of my various club affiliations or my employer. I write this as a GS owner who wants to see more GS owners at the qualifier in 2 years. I want to fight people for a spot and not have tickets still on sale a few days before the event.

The ‘boots on the ground’ staff from Performance Center & BMW Motorrad NA were AMAZING. What a fantastic group of people who made this event awesome. There was so much work that went into preparation, organization and execution. Truly a team effort and I have a huge appreciate for how much they did to make this happen! I hope we get to do the event here again in 2 years.

Above, our volunteers who showed up Thursday and gave 20 hours of their time over Three days to coach, help, guide, mend the competitors. These unpaid helpers were all smiles and worked their butts off. I’m glad to call a few of them my friends now and I hope to see them again.

I’ll leave you all with a few more photos of me competing. These photos are sourced from 4 different people who shared them with me after the event.

Here are a few more photos I took with my camera in the 2 hours I was running around as challenges come to a close for the general qualifier before the semi-finals took place. Semi-Finals / Finals were not allowed to be captured so we could keep things fair for the West Coat qualifier:

…and that’s it. That’s the 2022 GS Trophy Qualifier East Coast hosted at the BMW Performance Center. I spent $400, drove 2200 miles and was atop my bike for 2.5 days and slept on the ground so I could attempt to get a free trip to Albania. What ended up happening was a lot of self-realization, a lot of laughs and some new friendships. You can’t put a price on all of the dividends attending this event will give me. I’ll see many of you again in 2 years but this time, I’m hoping to be standing alongside all of you as a photographer and cheering on Heather as my wife and participant.

PS: A video is coming. It’s a lot of content and I have a busy week ahead.