Without doubt one of Trial’s brightest rising global stars, British hot prospect Harry Hemingway (Beta) has been given a highly-prized wild card ride for X-Trial Leeds – round six of the 2026 FIM X-Trial World Championship – and the nineteen-year-old is aiming to make full use of it.
“I’d love to make the Final and try and push for a podium,” he said. “I definitely think it’s on. There’s no reason why I can’t push for podiums and to do it at Leeds would be very special.”
His competition in the impressive city centre First Direct Bank Arena on the evening of Saturday 24 January 2026 will include the Spanish trio of Toni Bou (Repsol Honda), Jaime Busto (GASGAS) and Gabriel Marcelli (Repsol Honda) – who together have dominated the world top three, indoors and outside, for the last three years – and it is tempting to dismiss Hemingway’s statement as a mere teenage dream, but this would be wrong on two levels.
For starters, he will celebrate his twentieth birthday on 24 January so, technically, by the time he rolls out onto the arena floor his teenage years will be behind him and secondly – and most importantly – he has the skills to back up his fighting talk.
The newly-crowned FIM Trial2 World Champion will be very much the local hero when ML Events brings the FIM X-Trial World Championship back to Britain for the first time in a decade as part of a three-year deal to run its home round of the series. A veteran of all three DL12 Indoor Trials staged just down the road in Sheffield, by moving the action less than forty miles north it brings the proud Yorkshireman even closer to home.
“When all your friends and family come out to support you, you really want to put on a show for them and it couldn’t get any more local – it’s literally fifteen minutes from my house. I grew up in Leeds and I drive past the arena all the time so to be competing there is unreal. We used to joke about it when we drove past – “imagine if there was a Trial in there one day” – but we never thought it would happen.”
With his experience of top-flight Indoor Trials limited to three Sheffield appearances and a couple of wild card rides in the 2025 X-Trial World Championship, Hemingway knows he has a winter of hard work ahead of him if he is going to be a podium threat.
“Training for Indoor Trials is quite a lot different. There’s not a lot you can do in the UK in winter so we’ll head out to Spain where there are loads of man-made places to practice indoor techniques. Indoors is all about getting lined up and being absolutely perfect. When you’re ten feet up in the air on a bit of concrete that’s maybe five inches wide you have to be so precise and for me that’s an element of Indoor Trials that I really enjoy.”
Tickets for X-Trial Leeds on Saturday 24 January 2026 are already selling fast. Click here to secure your seats as the FIM X-Trial World Championship returns to the UK after a ten-year absence.
Click here for full event details.