It’s perhaps no surprise that one of the new competitors on TV’s Gladiators is a pro mountain biker. Hannah catches up with Privateer Bikes rider Kerry Wilson to find out what makes her tick.

WORDS HANNAH

Credit: BBC/Hungry Bear Media

Look up Kerry Wilson on Instagram and you might need a lie down. It’s exhausting – sport, outdoors, fitness, action! It’s not the carefully curated shots of sunsets and rainbows of the influencer – it’s the bundle of snaps from someone out with friends, buzzing on life, and grabbing photos and clips before the next run – whether that be on wheels, snow, or otherwise. As someone who only started riding bikes in 2018, yet heads into 2024 riding with support from Privateer, it’s clear Kerry has natural ability when it comes to anything adrenaline-fuelled and physical. It might come as no surprise then that you can see her battling it out as a Contender on this year’s TV nostalgia-show of Gladiators. Yet her achievements on the bike and her TV appearance are something of a surprise to Kerry. I caught up with her to discover how it’s all come about.

Let’s buy a mountain bike

“I started motocross when I was seven, through watching my dad. It was a family thing. His dad did it, my granddad. So with my dad, I had literally no choice! I was getting a motorbike because I was basically his little son. I got a little 50cc motorbike at 7 and then stopped riding motocross at 24. Yeah, continuously for that many years.”

You can be forgiven for feeling a teeny bit jealous of the next part of her life, as Kerry and her wife Amber hit the Morzine scene, working winter seasons so they could be there for the snowboarding. Somewhere along the line, they realised that when the snow melts, everyone switches to bikes, so instead of leaving for the summer, they got equipped.

“We started our first winter in Les Arcs. And then we realised that because we weren’t quite ready to go home, we could do a summer. And it had become super apparent that everyone had mountain bikes in the summer. I’d made really good friends with Emily Horridge [who] it turns out, was super badass on a mountain bike – I didn’t even know! So we were like ‘We need to buy a bike. I’ve never mountain biked before so, yeah, just something that’ll last us a summer so we can play in the summer until the winter comes back around’. And then that was literally the start of it.”