Want to have a glimpse into the world of being a famous pro rider? Watch this vid.

It follows happy-go-lucky Santa Cruz-sponsored mountain bike racer Mitch Ropelato around during his weekend of riding and racing at the 2016 Crankworx in Whistler, Canada.

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The whole thing is shot from his POV – presumably via a helmet-mounted action camera. The effect is really rather er, effective! It helps that Ropelato does a lot of laughing and clearly hasn’t forgotten that bikes are just plain fun.

The video is called ‘Steps To The Top’ and it contains Ropelato dishing out hundreds of high fives, fist bumps and autographs to fans, spectators and kids.

Amidst the rapid-cut off-bike spectator-interaction bits there’s some great POV riding featured in this video too. Dual descender racing, gnarly Garbanzo DH crashing, the Whip Off World Champs, the Canadian Open DH and the Ultimate Pump Track Challenge (which Ropelato wins).

SRAM say: “Yeah, ‘Fun on a bicycle’ sounds like an anemic primary-school physical-exercise campaign, or something you’d see on a bike company poster from the late 1800s. And when you hear a professional athlete say the word fun — as in, ‘I’m just trying to have fun out there’ — you usually wonder if they should’ve practiced something, anything, more intelligent to say. You wonder if the scared witless, nervous tick of talking about fun actually fools them, because it sure doesn’t fool you. Or you want to slash their tires because, while you’re formatting another column in a spreadsheet, they are ‘just out here having fun, dude.’

“There are, however, riders who truly, simply, live for the act of riding itself. These riders forever pedal with the same professional innocence as a preschooler who’s just unlocked the magic of two wheels. For these riders, fun is not prepared speech or a marketing blurb, but rather one of life’s necessities. Like air, water, food.

“You probably can’t ride just like Mitch. And it doesn’t matter. Not to him. And it shouldn’t to you. You can be a kid as long as you want, and be like Mitch when you remember to have fun. Fun on a bicycle.”