About the festival

It all started in summer 2017 when four friends came up with the idea of organizing a small whip off contest here in Slovenia. In one week we came up with an event called "Slovenian Whip-off championships". It was a small gathering, around 18 riders jumped and showed off their style on one BIG jump and around 150 people came to see it.

We all loved the feedback we got from everyone, so in 2018, we decided to reshape the jump and build a dual slalom to add a little more to the event. We also renamed it to "Flat Out". In partnership with Redbull, we managed to get some pro riders such as Tomas Slavik and Filip Flisar, and that's how we got the word out in the world. This year we counted around 1000 visitors and everyone was hyped over the event.

For 2019, we started thinking about the long term vision of the event. We decided to make the event into a festival and add live music in the evening. Over the summer we made a pump track in the park to have a race under the stars. We also stretched the festival to 3 days. We had at least 3000 people, the energy was insane and the festival got more recognition in the MTB community.

From the last two events we knew we need to find a bigger place to reach our maximum potential and we found it in 2020. MTB trail center Kočevje was just getting started and we saw a lot of potential in the place.

Before we got there, they already had around 12 km of trails, single tracks, and technical trails, a Flow trail, skills park, a pump track, and a dirt section.

With the help of the Batt Crew guys we managed to change the whole bottom part of the park in just four months. We also built a new jump line for everyone and reshaped the finish area into three different lines, from beginner to expert riders. The jump line has an intersection in the middle, which leads to the 4 massive jumps for the invited riders and is open only in time of the festival.

We stretched the festival to 4 days. Because of covid restrictions, we had 380 visitors (from Slovenia, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Croatia) that joined us.

Our trail builder and organizer of Big line session Jan invited 40 international riders. Besides that we hosted different activities that every visitor can participate in:

• Pit stop pumptrack
• Whips N Tricks session
• Bunny hop challenge
• Longest manual challenge
• Beer pong

In 2021 our main focus was improvements of the riding infrastructure:

• Reshaped Big Line
• New step up with mulch
• New trail finish area

The festival was also extended to a 7 day festival.

After so much work in 2021 we could finally bring out the Flat Out Days into the festival we always dreamed of! Beside the MTB trails we also had more time to focus on the venue. We created few chill spots at the festival, lunch area and sick entry point with festival merchandise.

Visitors could participate in many activities at the festival:

• Guided Morning Yoga
• Ride the park lines
• Kids sessions
• Visit the nearby lake
• Watch invited riders sending it on the Big line
• Evening fun entertainment

This time we paid special attention to the nature conservation aspect and started developing our BeGreen movement. In addition to advising visitors to visit us by bike or public transport our actions included:

• Reusable cups
• Ban on plastic in our bars (we only sold cans)
• Every visitor who camped received bags for recycling

The trail center started the process of legalising MTB infrastructure, the Big line was not a part of it - so we would have to tear it down and re-build it every year (that is a cost that the festival could not afford). So we put efforts into ways we can add our festival infrastructure in the parks trail legalisation process but we could not find common ground with the park management.

The park management demolished the Big line - and we started looking for a new home.