From a very young age, Daniel Shaw liked to go downhill, and he liked to do it as fast as possible.
He remembers the joy he used to take in riding a pedal bike down a big hill in his townhouse complex. Or more likely he's been told of the joy — the memories are probably pretty fuzzy given that he was just three years old at the time.
"I was just going down that as fast as I could," he says. His antics earned him the nickname Triple D — for Daredevil Dan — that everyone around the complex called him except for one important person: his mother Lynda.
"I did not," she says. Lynda, in fact, was never a fan of the high speed hijinks. "We always went camping and did those kind of adventury things, but not crazy adventury. But he just had it in him."
He still has it in him. In fact Daniel, now 17, recently won the junior men's title at the 2014 Canadian Mountain Bike Downhill Championships, a victory that earned him a spot in the UCI Mountain Bike Junior World Championships running Sept. 2-7 in Hafjell, Norway. It turns out he's pretty good at this downhill thing — you better get used to it, Mom.
The Shaws, including Daniel's father Dennis, moved from Burnaby to North Vancouver when Daniel was six, and one year later he discovered a place basically in his backyard where he could go even faster: Mount Seymour. Daniel started heading up the mountain and testing himself on local trails like Mushroom and Corkscrew.
"It was scary," he says, adding that his plan was always to "just make it down."
He was hooked though, and by age of 13 he'd built up enough confidence to enter the downhill competition at Crankworx — an annual festival in Whistler that Lynda was hoping Daniel didn't know about.
"He found it himself," she says with a sigh. "He came to dad and said 'I really want to do this race.'" It didn't go very well. Daniel was the only racer to show up without a soft tail bike normally used for downhill riding.
"We were just really newbies at it," says Lynda. "We put him in the race with a hard tail — you wouldn't do that if you knew what you were doing."
The tail wasn't the only problem with the bike.
"My chain came off," says Daniel. "I was kind of scared of what to do. I just rode down without the chain."
He finished well back in the pack, but was not discouraged. He jumped right back into the competition the following year. It didn't go well again, as Daniel managed to crack the frame of his bike — now a soft tail — on a wipeout.
"I just went too far into a corner and slid out. My handlebars grabbed the ground weird and put pressure on my frame."
Daniel's love of the sport finally started translating into podium placings last season, and this year he's really taken off. The biggest win came in Kamloops where he ripped through dry, scorching conditions to beat the best juniors in Canada and become a national champion.
"That was the greatest race," says Daniel. "The trail wasn't very fun, but it just seemed to work out. It was very dry, it was about 40 degrees out. It's weird — your throat just hurts the whole way down."
Last week he finally cracked the Crankworx jinx as well, finishing third in the junior open category. Now he's off to Norway to face the best in the world.
"It's scary, but really exciting," he says of the gigantic leaps his career has taken.
As for Mom, well, she's starting to come around. Slowly. She goes to all of Daniel's races but still can't bear to actually watch when he's on course.
"I pray, and then I read," she says. "Or I'll talk to someone else. Those races are so fast, it's not a long time. You just kind of look the other way and distract yourself."
Lynda admits, however, that the sport has helped her son grow and mature in ways she never imagined. He's learned to fix nearly every part on his bicycle because the family — despite generous support from friends, family and several local businesses — doesn't have the cash to repair every $2,000 trinket that pops off. He's done presentations in front of rooms packed with business people in an effort to gain sponsors. He's learned how to make connections and build a support network, how to bring his friends along for the ride through side projects like photography and filmmaking. All of this from a kid who is still in high school, about to enter his Grade 12 year at Seycove secondary.
"I'm quietly very proud of him," says Lynda. "I look at the long range and I see this is a guy who when he wants to do something, he's going to learn how to find a way to make it happen.... He's just mentally disciplined in a way that I'm in awe of, really, in (his biking career) at least — if you looked at his bedroom, that's a whole other thing...." Lynda knows that they come at this from two very different perspectives.
"His psyche is totally different from mine. He thinks I'm a worrywart. It's just a mom thing."
But her prudence has worn off a little too. Daniel made a stir last year when a video of him doing the Toonie Drop — an infamous North Shore feature that is basically a 40-foot fall placed in the middle of a tricky, narrow trail — won him top spot in a competition run by Pink Bike. Daniel was happy to win, but it didn't make him want to push the envelope ever further.
"It was scary, it was so big," he says. "I'm probably not going back anytime soon."
He is, however, going to keep racing, riding fast enough to make his mother cringe. At heart, he's still that young daredevil.
"I can just go really fast and then it gets scary," he says. "That's when it gets fun."
