When I was a young impressionable teenager, mountain biking was all
about Cross country “XC” racing. MBUK featured coverage of the races and I put
up posters of world cup riders like GT’s Rishi Grewal and Raleigh’s David Baker
on my bedroom wall. In the 1990’s XC mountain biking was uber cool!
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| XC team photo used to sell a bike. Very 1990's! |
Skinny lycra clad racers don’t make much of an appearance in magazines
or in brand marketing anymore. The big names in the sport are EWS riders like Richie
Rude and Jared Graves. Selling bikes in recent years is all about dramatic
shots of burly Enduro bikes, with riders in baggy shorts throwing themselves
off a precipitous mountain ledge in a shower of stones.
Roll into a trail center wearing lycra, on a bike with 100mm of travel
and wait for the stunned silence and awkward glances from the padded and full
face helmet crowd resting in the back of their VW Transporters. At XC races there
is an obvious lack of youngsters coming into the sport. It’s the same old faces
every season and none of us are getting any younger! The guys winning the local
races now are the same as 10 years ago. Where are the young guns coming in to
knock them off their perch? My gut tells me they are either indoors on the
X-box, or styling it up with their mates at the local downhill trail. A XC race
is no longer a ‘cool’ place to be.
At my local events, race entries have dwindled. To take a benchmark, the
Gorrick Open category is where many aspiring young riders, including myself,
cut their racing teeth. The races used to regularly attract fields of over 100.
I spent my formative years desperately battling for a top 10 position. Last
February there were only 11 competing in Open at one of the rounds. The knock
on effect is that organisers are planning less races. When the 2018 Southern
Series was announced, there were only 4 dates. Worse still there are just 2 Gorrick
Spring Series events this year. We’ve got used to both series being fought out
over 5 or 6 rounds.
Part of this (especially in Gorricks case) I feel might be down to the
lack of available venues, but no doubt fewer competitors means organisers have
had to tighten their belts when negotiating with landowners.
Another challenge is strength in other areas of the sport. Gorrick have
followed the trend, replacing one of their XC events with a gravity Enduro race.
There are also many cyclocross races and the popularity of road riding in the
UK on the back of our professional athletes successes, has also shifted the
spotlight away from mountain biking. There is a local road sportive somewhere almost
every weekend throughout the year and weekly races all through the summer.
There is however the sense that things may be changing. A number of the
major brands have recently announced new XC focused race bikes and smaller
brands seem to be following suit. Advances in technology mean that a XC bike is
now a far more capable machine. This means that courses are getting more gnarly
and technical. Races are no longer fought out on forest fireroads. The twisty,
rocky singletrack is now scattered with dramatic drops and gap jumps. This
provides striking, photogenic images for marketing, and a more appealing
perception of fun and excitement rather just the threat of burning legs and
lungs!
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| Nino Schurter at the World Cup in South Africa February 2018 |
Sections of the latest World Cup courses look more like Downhills
tracks. This has added to the drama of the sport and we all have a new hero in
Nino Shurter to idolise. I watched the first round of the World Cup in South Africa
last week, transfixed to Redbull TV for the whole 2 hours. (Another one of
challenges of XC racing in a world of quick fixes, is races lasting over 90
minutes, compared to a downhill run of 3.) I was in awe of the skill on show, shoulder to
shoulder racing the whole way ending in a sprint finish! As an advert for the sport
you couldn’t do better.
