Back in 2008, Michel Plonka started a blog with one goal in mind; create a platform to promote the eastern canadian Freestyle scene and it’s community. We like to refer to it as The Rise’s official starting point, despite not yet being called The Rise. The name was found around a year later while on a Dobermann Bikes trip to Interbike. Michel Plonka, Jeremy Menduni, Matt Macduff and Vincent Allard were on route for a 48h drive from Montreal to Las Vegas, and set themselves the goal of finding a new name for the blog before reaching their destination. After spending a day coming up with the most ridiculous ideas one can imagine, The Rise came up and the rest is history.

Right from the start, The Rise carried an open-minded and optimistic attitude, which quickly sparked the scene’s interest. Larger Mtb sites where not posting a lot of good Freestyle MTB content, which formed a sub-culture, and The Rise became it’s home. The Rise was always driven by nothing but the will to have a good time riding bikes, and it’s mission is to motivate others to have fun riding bikes. We quickly started showcasing it by creating exclusive videos and the response has been amazing. Vincent Allard’s initiative to create a full lenght movie right from the start hit the internet by surprise and pulled a lot of attention towards The Rise. A Few months later, we met Louis Lhomel; a funny caracter that happened to be extremely talented at both riding and making videos. To this day, Louis Lhomel created about 80% of The Rise’s visuals and shows no sign of slowing down.

A lot of companies pretend to be rider owned and operated, but The Rise really is. We started from nothing and did everyting ourselves. Wether it’s filming, editing, running websites, designing and selling clothing, organising events, we taught ourselves how to do it all and made it happen. The guys that operate The Rise are the same dudes you see in the videos and that will never change.