Being a professional rider can mean a variety of things: million-dollar contracts, magazine covers, global ad campaigns, signature products, medals, contest glory and even mainstream international fame. But for every big name, there are also countless other lesser-known pros. The foot soldiers who, regardless of ratings and rewards, have dedicated their lives to the boardriding cause and whose pure passion and love for what they do outstrips the lure of nine-to-five job security.

Take twenty-six-year-old Austrian pro snowboarder and bowl skater Chris ‘Cab’ Percival. He rarely reaches the podium of big skateboard or snowboard contests, yet he is arguably one of the hardest working riders in Europe. And with his reckless and unmistakeable style, penchant for wacky retro sunglasses and bandanas, trademark leopard print jacket, tattoos, long hair and bohemian love of nightlife, he’s one of those legend underground guys you would have to be blind to miss at any park.

Hailing from Radfeld in Austria, home to the infamous Cradle in Rattenberg, Chris has been skating and snowboarding since his early teens and riding competitively for more than a decade. As a rookie snowboarder, he took part in tons of halfpipe events in North America and Europe, and when another rider had to pull out, found himself in the Nokia Totally Board Invitational Big Air in Oberhousen, Germany, in the summer of 2000. Cab made the top 16, won €700 and never looked back.

Yet Chris also ran a successful taxi company at home for a few years (which of course earned him his nickname), before quitting to ride full time. He then took his work ethic and experience from this enterprise on the road, gathering footage for his sponsors, including Rome SDS, Skullcandy, Vans, Misfit Clothing, Innsbruck’s XDouble shop and Black Label and Bones for skateboarding. His approach is pure punk rock DIY. “If I don’t do shit, nothing happens,” says Chris, who spends up to 200 days a year on his missions, and the remainder of the time compiling his evidence, writing articles and promoting his personal cause. As a result, he appears regularly in snowboard and skate media across Europe, and has had cameos in 411 VM, Thrasher and a full-page sequence getting inverted at his local skatepark’s cradle in Transworld Skateboarding.

But he is also a national champ. The progeny of a South African mom and Austrian dad, Chris spent a few years in South Africa as a kid and has dual citizenship. Keen to explore his roots further, in 2006 Chris was stoked to find out they had a small snowboarding scene and an annual championship at the country’s only resort, Tiffindell. Chris duly won the Big Air and then defended his title in 2007, bringing a crew of fellow Austrian snow pros, namely Seppi Scholler, Marc Swoboda and filmer Hias Leinich, to share and document the experience on a month-long 5000 mile skate, surf and snow road trip.

Disappointed by the poor season in Europe, Chris then returned to Cape Town earlier this year, with another creative approach to getting original snowboarding footage. Thanks to a bunch of local surfers and skaters he befriended here, Cab managed to obtain a few hundred pounds of ice from boats in a small fishing village called Hout Bay and was able to lipslide a flat bar within shouting distance of the ocean. In fact, you could have heard his gravely scream of stoke back in Austria when he stuck his groundbreaking trick. “It was a huge gamble,” said Chris,” but I pulled it off and got the shot.”

These days, Chris is also finding a new niche in commentating at snow and skate events, the most recent being the Quiksilver Bowlriders at Malmo in Sweden. “It is just a different way of making the crowds go off,” he says. “Plus it is some nice cash too and a way to stay involved in the scene, even on the days to come, where my body might be to old and to hurt to do anything actively.” Until then, even though he and his devoted wife Simmy sometimes scrape to make ends meet, Chris is happy to keep riding and travelling, living the pro dream. “If I feel like hitting up a comp, I will,” he adds. “If I need to get footage I will go get some. But if I wake up after a night of heavy snowstorms and the morning is blue bird, you are bound to find me in my home resort of Alpbach shredding up the secret lines of powpow!”

As they say, it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it, haven’t they?

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Chris ‘Cab’ Percival – The Foot Soldier (text) by Miles Masterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.