Snfoilhat

Dual slalom: possibly more stressful than gravel racing. I can't speak to that, but welcome to the greatest mountain bike racing format, welcome!!

Friday morning w/ cloudy skies and 100% humidity, the Canadian crossing was a mud flat before it dried out to become the dust pit on view here -- such a fun track! So many changes from moment to moment between supporting your weight and giving way

@suspended-flesh: that was a blast!

Creature report addendum : the drones are ripping (whizzing? Fizzling?) down the dual slalom course right now

Long live slalom

I’m so curious about the marketing here, specifically why include that table of accelerations at different lever forces between the two model rotors. Because the story being told elsewhere in the press release is pretty straightforward. But if you look closely at the table it _undercuts_ the story. There’s too much variance between the six runs at 40 nM for the two means to be considered different. Open up your preferred stats calculator and check. I’d like to know who is the mountain bike media consumer they imagine really wants to see the table, wants to see a token that a company is ‘data driven’ or whatever, but also isn’t really going to read what it says. It’s kinda condescending.

Custom cerakote color on each frame makes me think of Daylight Cycles’ BMX frames. Any week those are the best looking bikes at the track.

A lightly sprung lightly damped bike oscillating between sag and the travel where extra progression ramps up sounds like what people have used the the word 'wallowy" to describe. (???) Quick thoughts I would hope to see addressed in the longer piece forthcoming: data acquisition doesn't tell you how to set up the bike, only what the bike is doing. Descriptive rather than prescriptive. So the desired outcomes, whatever the setup goals are in terms of making the bike do or not do something, those exist outside the DA and you can talk about them without necessarily getting into the DA. Grip. Every time I see that word now I think I'm reading a Fox advertisement... Anyhow, grip: to my knowledge no one, no company, tuner, guru or blogger has presented a credible way of measuring mountain bike traction in a way that you could compare two different amounts of traction and infer that the cause was two different suspension settings. Especially not between two reasonable settings like "mediocre" and "Henry says it's better." Small differences are harder to show to be real than larger ones though we may all have a bias that tells us small differences are more likely to be true because they seem so easy to imagine versus big differences toward which we may be skeptical.

Respondents don’t seem to understand how averages work. The median dh elite man is qualifying what, 30th in the world cups? 45th? That guy should net (after expenses) $50000-100000/year? Or are all the privateers we think definitely need to be included in world cups not “pros” for the purposes of the survey? The “average” pro downhiller is not the one whose mean finish in a season of world cups is 15th….

Note that this quick estimation of the respondent size is only possible because of the low participation rate of women (women included there are 30 elites in the top 5 of three different disciplines). And if we split elites and juniors then I guess there are 60 different riders in the top 5 of three different disciplines and 2 sexes and 2 age categories -- all of which is to say that it can get really confusing not having the Ns!)