Gracey Hemstreet built the event she says she needed two years ago and ran it yesterday. Project 17 is a female-only invitational at Coast Gravity Park on BC’s Sunshine Coast, and it exists for one reason: Hemstreet won the first-ever women’s Red Bull Hardline final in February 2024 and still felt like she’d shown up unarmed. Three-time DH World Cup winner. Two-time Hardline champion. And the gap she’s talking about isn’t ability — it’s that nothing in the sport prepares a rider for Hardline-scale terrain before she’s standing at the top of it.

So she built the missing rung herself.

Quick Take

Event	Project 17, women’s DH progression invitational
Date/Venue	September 17, 2026, Coast Gravity Park, Sechelt, BC
Organizer	Gracey Hemstreet
Confirmed field	Hemstreet, Tilly Boadle, Mille Johnset, Jess Blewitt, plus Andreane Lanthier Nadeau, Arleigh Kemp, Cami Bragg, Indy Deavoll, Lina Frener, Tayte Proulx-Royds, Teagan Heap, Zoe Witwicki
Support	Red Bull (course build), Norco (Hemstreet’s DH team sponsor)
Course build	Remy Morton’s crew with Dylan Dunkerton
Calendar spot	~10 days before Whistler’s first UCI DH World Cup, ~1 month before Red Bull Hardline Cypress
Best for	Anyone tracking the pipeline between World Cup DH and Hardline
Skip if	You want live results (this was a progression day, not a race)

The Problem Hemstreet Actually Solved

Here’s the thing about Red Bull Hardline that doesn’t come through in highlight clips: it’s not downhill racing with bigger jumps bolted on. It’s a different sport wearing the same kit. A World Cup DH track rewards line choice and pedaling efficiency. Hardline rewards commitment to features that don’t have a slow option: you’re either doing the 75-foot gap or you’re not on the bike.

Hemstreet found that gap the hard way. She showed up to Red Bull Hardline’s Australian debut at Maydena Bike Park in Tasmania in February 2024 and became the first woman to ever complete a full race run on a Hardline course. She won. She also said, later, that she’d gotten there underprepared — not because she lacked the skill, but because there wasn’t a rung on the ladder between “World Cup racer” and “Hardline finalist,” as she put it: “there wasn’t really anything between racing or freeride or whatever you do, to Hardline.”

That’s a real structural hole, not a humblebrag. Enduro World Cup racers have a dozen intermediate stops between club racing and Worlds. Hardline had exactly one door, and it opened straight onto a canyon gap.

What Project 17 Actually Is

1. A female-only invitational, not an open event. Twelve riders, hand-picked, no qualifying and no spectator race format.
2. Held on a purpose-built progression line, not the park’s existing shuttle trails — a course scaled to sit between standard DH terrain and Hardline-grade features.
3. Backed by Red Bull for the build and Norco as Hemstreet’s team sponsor — the same brand relationships that got her to Maydena in the first place.
4. Scheduled deliberately, landing after the World Championships season wraps and before both Whistler’s World Cup and Hardline Cypress, so riders walk into both with fresh reps on bigger terrain.
5. Framed around access, not difficulty. Hemstreet’s own line on the project: “The goal isn’t to make it easy. It’s to make it possible.”

That last point is the one worth sitting with. A progression event built to make Hardline-scale terrain easier would be a diluted version of the real thing — useless as prep. One built to make it possible is a different exercise: same consequence, same commitment required, just with the structure and support to get a rider there without her first exposure being a live Hardline final.

Who’s In the Field, and Why It’s Not Just Hemstreet’s Friends

The invite list is where Project 17 stops being a vanity project and starts looking like actual talent development. Tilly Boadle joins as the newly crowned Junior DH World Champion — an 18-and-under title, but the kind of result that usually means a rider is a year or two from an elite Hardline invite, not five. Mille Johnset and Jess Blewitt are already on the other side of that gap: both have raced Hardline and World Cup DH, so their presence at Project 17 isn’t progression for them so much as it is course-building — showing the newer riders what the bar actually looks like up close, on a day with no bib number and no results sheet.

Round out the field with Andreane Lanthier Nadeau, Arleigh Kemp, Cami Bragg, Indy Deavoll, Lina Frener, Tayte Proulx-Royds, Teagan Heap, and Zoe Witwicki, and you’ve got a spread that runs from established World Cup names to riders most fans haven’t heard of yet. That spread is the point. A progression event that only invites riders who’ve already got Hardline invites isn’t progression — it’s a highlight reel. Project 17 mixes tiers on purpose.

We’ve watched a similar generational jump happen in the men’s field this season — 15-year-old Mack Manietta cracked the pro podium at the Fox US Open in Deer Valley against a five-time World Cup overall champion. Different discipline, same underlying story: the gap between “promising junior” and “credible threat at the top level” keeps shrinking, and it shrinks fastest when someone builds a structured way to close it instead of leaving riders to figure out big terrain alone.

Red Bull and Norco Didn’t Just Write a Check

Course construction credit goes to Remy Morton’s crew alongside Dylan Dunkerton — names that matter here because a progression line built wrong is worse than no progression line at all. Undersell the scale and riders arrive at Hardline still unprepared. Oversell it and someone gets hurt on a day designed to prevent exactly that. Red Bull backing the build isn’t surprising given the brand already owns Hardline itself; a feeder event that produces better-prepared Hardline entrants is good for the sport it’s currently the only sponsor of at this scale.

Norco’s involvement reads differently — this is Hemstreet’s own DH team sponsor, not a neutral third party. That matters because Norco’s Race Division, now run by newly-inducted Hall of Famer Greg Minnaar, has spent the last couple of seasons building out a development pipeline of its own. A team sponsor backing an athlete-led progression event that isn’t limited to its own roster is a different kind of investment than funding a single rider’s race program, and it’s consistent with the direction Norco’s gravity side has been heading.

The Calendar Squeeze Made This Timing Deliberate

Project 17 landed on September 17 — a name-matching date that’s clearly not an accident — sitting about a week and a half before Whistler hosts its first-ever UCI Downhill World Cup on September 25–27, and roughly a month ahead of Red Bull Hardline’s first-ever Canadian round at Cypress in mid-October. That’s not a random gap on the calendar. It’s the exact window where a rider headed to both events can bank time on bigger terrain without it colliding with race-week taper or travel.

For riders like Boadle who aren’t racing Hardline Cypress yet, the timing still matters — Whistler’s World Cup courses are already trending toward bigger, faster terrain than the tour ran a few seasons ago, and time spent on a scaled-up progression line translates even for riders staying in the DH World Cup lane. Jackson Goldstone, Hemstreet’s fellow BC racer and a name that keeps coming up in the same Hardline conversations as hers, is proof that the World Cup and Hardline fields increasingly overlap rather than run parallel.

Why This Matters Beyond One Event Day

Women’s Hardline is three years old. Hemstreet and Louise-Anna Ferguson were the first women to race a Hardline final at all, at that same Maydena event in 2024, and the women’s field has grown every year since — but growing an invite list isn’t the same as growing a pipeline. If the only way into that field is “be good enough at World Cup DH that Red Bull notices you,” the field stays small and the attrition stays brutal, because World Cup skills and Hardline skills only partially overlap.

Project 17 is Hemstreet using her own position — an athlete with Red Bull’s ear and a team sponsor willing to back something bigger than her own race calendar — to build infrastructure the sport hadn’t gotten around to building on its own. That’s a bigger deal than one invitational at one bike park. If it runs again next year with a bigger invite list and this year’s junior standouts moved up a tier, it’ll have done exactly what it set out to do.

Who Should Care About This

Anyone tracking women’s gravity racing’s next tier. Boadle, Frener, and Witwicki are names worth remembering before they’re the ones headlining a Hardline field.

Fans of the Hemstreet/Hardline story. This is the direct follow-up to her Maydena 2024 breakthrough — the moment that created the gap she’s now trying to close for everyone behind her.

Anyone planning to watch Whistler’s World Cup or Hardline Cypress. Several Project 17 riders are headed straight into one or both of those events within weeks.

Who Should Skip This

Anyone looking for race results or times. Project 17 has no bib numbers, no clock, and no results sheet by design — it’s a progression day, not a competition.

Readers wanting course footage or feature-by-feature breakdowns. Neither Red Bull nor Coast Gravity Park has published a full course teardown as of this post, and we’re not going to guess at specifics we haven’t confirmed.

The Bottom Line

Gracey Hemstreet turned her own worst pre-Hardline moment into a blueprint. Project 17 put twelve riders — from newly-crowned Junior World Champion Tilly Boadle to Hardline veterans Mille Johnset and Jess Blewitt — on a purpose-built progression line at Coast Gravity Park on September 17, timed to land right before Whistler’s World Cup and a month ahead of Hardline’s first-ever Canadian round. Red Bull funded the build. Norco backed the athlete who thought of it. Nothing about that structure existed when Hemstreet needed it in 2024. It exists now because she got tired of waiting for someone else to build it.

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Reporting sourced from Pinkbike’s coverage of the Project 17 announcement, Canadian Cycling Magazine’s feature on Hemstreet building Project 17, and Coast Reporter’s report on Hemstreet’s 2024 Red Bull Hardline win at Maydena.