FreestyleXtreme Magazine Issue 22 | Page 27

................ ................ Five minutes with... Alastair Sayer Botswana’s Kalahari desert is a heck of a place to cut your teeth on motocross - but that’s where Alastair Sayer got a taste for FMX before going on to race in the South African MX championship. But a taste was enough and he’s been hitting ramps for a living for over a decade. We caught up with him at Masters of Dirt. ................................... Y ou’ve been up to a lot since we saw you last - X-Fighters, Nitro World Games - let’s rewind a bit, how was your 2016? 2016 was a pretty crazy year. I did really well. I got back on board with Monster Energy, South Arica. I started riding for them again, which was really cool and help me out as far as getting to the Nitro World Games - that’s how that started. What does a Nitro World Games invite look like? Does Travis ask for you in person? Nah, just an email and stuff. You’re invited to the qualifier, so I went out there. Monster Energy helped me out with that, which was cool. And then it was hard-core because when I got out there, I couldn’t get a bike. Spent a lot of money trying to fix up Suzuki, which in the end didn’t work. Then I looked for a Yamaha. Jimmy Hall lent me his YZ 250, which was really cool, but then he needed that for a flat track race that night. So I fixed that bike up and rode it in the morning. I’m like “cool, now I’ve gotten used to the Yamaha, quick, let’s work on it”. Then that bike disappeared. I tried to get some help and support from Yamaha South Africa. u FreestyleXtreme.com | 27