Mountain Bike Hall of Fame Announces Rachel Atherton, Darren Berrecloth, Radek Burkat & Others as 2021 Inductees

The Marin Museum of Bicycling & Mountain Bike Hall of Fame has announced the 2021 Hall of Fame inductees, a group of six mountain biking greats whose contributions to the sport have helped shape it into what it is today: Rachel Atherton, Darren Berrecloth, Radek Burkat, Dave Cullinan, Dave Kelly, and Rob McSkimming. We'd like to recognize each of their riders for their immense contributions to the sport and note the well-deserved place each of these riders has earned in mountain bike history.


Rachel Atherton


You all don't need me to tell you about Rachel Atherton's impact on the sport. The youngest of the Atherton trio won her first elite World Cup race in 2006 and remained at the top for more than a decade, winning every race in 2016 in what's been called the perfect season. All in all, so far, she's won 39 World Cup downhill races, six overall World Cup season titles, and so much more. Throughout her career, she's also overcome countless injuries, undergone 12 shoulder surgeries, and definitively raised the bar for the passion, dedication, training, physical toughness, and intensity that goes into a downhill mountain biking career. She's not done, either, and plans to return to the race track as soon as she's back up to speed after having a child. Now a team owner, bike company founder, mentor, and mother, we can't wait to see what she has up her sleeve to achieve next.

Darren Berrecloth


Darren Berrecloth's career has spanned most of freeride mountain biking, as a kid who grew up into the budding North Shore freeride scene. He was one of the first to bring BMX tricks to mountain bike features, appearing in several early freeride movies and continuing to push boundaries in front of the camera throughout the following decades. He's collected two Rampage podiums, his fair share of slopestyle results, and some of the most impressive media appearances in mountain bike history. The way he has combined competition riding, media projects, and social media savvy has essentially defined what it means to be a professional freeride mountain biker today.

Radek Burkat


Radek Burkat is the reason we're all here. Burkat is an IT wizard whose family migrated from Poland to Canada when he was young, and he seems to have been exactly the right person in just the right place at the right time: he discovered mountain biking in the '90s when freeriding was snowballing in western Canada, and it occurred to him that riders and trailbuilders would benefit from a platform where they could gather and see what everyone else in the budding mountain biking scene was up to. He had both the vision and the skillset to make something happen. In 1998, he created Pinkbike, and later ironed out the details with Trevor May of a mapping app that would be launched as Trailforks.

You are all reading this right now, so I suppose that speaks for itself.

Dave Cullinan


Dave Cullinan's World Championship run in 1992 is the stuff of legends. The rainbow-winning run in Bromont, Canada, is part of Cullinan's enduring legacy, though he has a long list of victories to his name, both before and after that wild ride. Near the bottom of the course, riders exited the woods and crossed a bridge with a chairlift passing narrowly over their heads, so low that to jump at all would be to risk colliding with a chair in midair. Cullinan started to notice the timing of the chairs in his practice laps and, in the final race run, ended up slowing down as he came out of the woods, waiting for the timing to be just right, and then sending it. No other rider attempted to jump the bridge. The rest of his run, too, was balls-out, but it's that bridge jump that was marked down in history as the defining moment of his World Championship gold medal run.

The following year, he tore his aorta in a crash, but even after a series of open-heart surgeries, he continued racing and winning throughout the '90s. It wasn't until 1999 that his professional career ended due to a wrist injury. "Dave Cullinan gave his heart to the sport of mountain biking," the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame blurb says.

Dave Kelly & Rob McSkimming


No place on earth has the same allure to mountain bikers as the Whistler Bike Park, and we can largely thank Dave Kelly and Rob McSkimming for making that the case. Dave and Rob built some of the most iconic trails at Whistler from the mid and late '90s onward, and we can thank them for A-Line, Dirt Merchant, and plenty of the other trails that have become household names. Eventually, Dave became the bike park co-manager and was an essential driver in making Whistler Whistler.

In 2007, Dave and Rob started Gravity Logic alongside Tom Prochazka, another former Whistler Bike Park director and part of the team that created Dirt Merchant. That's how Whistler's renowned flow escaped British Columbia and found its way to bike parks throughout North American and Europe.

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Industry News Darren Berrecloth Rachel Atherton Radek Burkat