Aaron Chase (Pic: Shaun Spomer)

There’s a long and honourable tradition of companies giving freeride teams silly names, usually in an effort to avoid referring to them as a “team”, what with all the old-fashioned sporting and competition connotations that goes with it. So Rocky Mountain once had its Froriders, Kona’s got a Clump and now Cannondale has The Cut.

“The Cut is a group of seven of the world’s most innovative, creative and progressive riders,” gushes the press release. “Each
member of the squad brings their own element, style, strength and personality,” it continues, managing to somehow make the whole exercise sound a bit like a videogame – we can almost see the riders rotating on a virtual pedestal next to a stack of barcharts measuring style, strength, speed, technical ability and nerve. But we digress.

Anyway, the personnel in question include long-time Cannondale rider Aaron Chase, along with Mick Hannah, Chris Van Dine, Wayne Goss, George Ryan, Carlo Dieckmann and Chris Hatton. There’re some possibly-made-up quotes to go with this story which don’t really bear repetition – “…progressive…ripping…pumped…psyched…shred…” – you get the idea. To their credit, though, no-one from Cannondale appears to be “stoked”.

The Cut will be all over the place in 2007, showing up at UCI World Cups and “premier slopestyle events” worldwide. In Europe the riders will be travelling around in a big RV thing and also filming for a DVD. The Cut is managed by Don Hampton and Kara Chase of DH Productions, which produces Aaron Chase’s DVDs.