Nerding Out: Is the Rainbow Curse Real in Downhill?

The World Championships' Rainbow Jersey holds prominence in mountain biking like nothing else. It's the holy grail of the sport and a symbol that says: "I'm the fastest, catch me if you can." Only the racers who have been able to prove themselves as the top dog in a one-shot, all-or-nothing format can earn the right to wear it and even some of the greatest riders in the sport's history have fallen short.

But the Stripes come with a downside - the dreaded curse. Crashes, injuries, middling results, the curse has struck in many different ways over the year. Steve Peat believed in the curse so strongly that he threw himself into the bushes at Leogang in 2010 to get the jersey dirty before his race run and remove the curse. That ended up being his joint-best run of the year with a 6th place finish.

So, is the curse real? And just how bad is it for the racers? We're going to dig into the data to find out.

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The World Champions

There have actually been fewer World Champions than you might think. In fact, there have been 14 men and 15 women who have donned the elite Rainbow Jerseys in the event's history, although that only began back in 1990


World Cup overall position

The first place we wanted to look was at the overall position of the rider the year they earned the World Champs jersey and then compare that to the year after. You would expect the overall position of the rider to be worse if the curse was real. The rider's overall performance is probably the best way to measure an entire season of their output so it should iron out any bad runs. We've only been able to go back to 1997 as that's the earliest year we have consistent World Cup overall results from. This misses out the first five years that World Cups and World Championships were held. It's also worth noting that sometimes the World Championships happen halfway through a season, you have to feel most sorry for Nico Vouilloz, who only had the jersey for 3 races in 2000 before handing it over to Myles Rockwell.

On the men's side of things, The World Champs jersey wearer has only improved their World Cup overall position 6 times since 1997 and they've recorded a worse position 13 times. The remaining 3 years can be accounted for by Nico Vouilloz, who retired as World Champion in 2002 and recorded back to back World Cup title and World Championship wins in 1999 and 2000.


This means that the World Champion has recorded a worse overall World Cup position wearing the jersey 59% of the time. This sounds like it's significant but on average, riders only lose 1.09 places in the overall year after they win the jersey and even if we discount the riders who improved or maintained their World Cup position, the average slip is only 3.6 places.

A lot of focus was put on Bruni doing the double last year and winning the World Champs alongside the World Cup overall, but here's another one for you, he became one of only 3 men to win the World Cup overall after having won the World Champs the year before, joining Sam Hill and Nico Vouilloz (who has done it 3 times).

For the women, the trend is even less obvious. Only 6 times in the 23 year period (26%) we're looking at has the World Champion posted a worse position the year after they won the World Championships. The biggest slip came from Anne Caroline Chausson in 2003 when she decided to only race one World Cup and the World Champs, both of which she won, of course. Other than that, Miranda Miller has the biggest difference in position when she dropped 5 spots from 9th to 14th after winning the stripes in Cairns. Before 2016, the biggest slide was 1 spot.


On average, women have been more consistent in the Rainbow Jersey than the men. In fact, the most common result is for women to end up finishing in the exact same spot in the year they earned the Rainbow Jersey and the year after.

Results


If you think winning the World Championships puts you in an elite club then try winning a World Cup in it. Only 5 men make up this threadbare list - Bruni, Hill, Barel, Minnaar, Vouilloz - however this doesn't mean that the jersey wearers end up wallowing in mid-pack mediocrity. In fact, there are only three years that a World Champion hasn't ended on the podium in at least one race the season after, Peat in 2010, Barel in 2006 and Rockwell in 2001. Even then, all of these riders posted at least one top ten result in the jersey.

On the women's side of things, that gets flipped on its head as only 4 of them haven't won a race while wearing the Stripes. Of those 4, only Miranda Miller never made it to the podium.


If you look at riders first result in the Rainbow jersey, the picture is a bit less peachy. For some riders, maybe the pressure of carrying those stripes takes a while to get used to but it's difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from just one data point.

Injuries


The Rainbow Curse has been used in road cycling way before it came into use in mountain biking but it has most likely stuck in our sport thanks to the injuries that seem to follow its wearer around like a bad smell. Rachel Atherton has probably taken the biggest of the bunch after being hit by a car head-on after winning the 2008 World Championships, which took her out for a whole season. It's worth noting she still won in the jersey though as there was another World Cup race in the 2008 season after her triumph.

Rachel was also famously injured in the Rainbow Stripes in 2017 at Fort William. She dislocated her shoulder in the woods section, relocated it herself but unfortunately ended her golden streak of 13 races won on the trot. Then again, if you've won as many World Championships as Rachel has, things are going to go wrong at some point. Aside from Rachel, only two other racers have failed to register a result the season after winning the jersey. Both Vouilloz and Chausson retired shortly after winning the stripes in 2002 and 2004 respectively, that's one hell of a mic drop.


Other notable injuries in the Rainbow jersey include Loic Bruni taking himself out on the first corner in Losinj in 2018, Sam Hill injuring himself while training at home halfway through 2011 and Fabian Barel breaking his foot while riding in Finland in 2006. Are these scattered incidences enough to constitute a curse? Probably not in a sport where injuries are so common.

So, is there a curse?

No, of course not, curses aren't real.

There is, however, a lot of pressure involved in wearing the Rainbow Jersey. In the offseason a racer will be pulled from pillar to post by media and sponsor requests, including from non-endemic brands, maybe for the first time. They will also set themselves an impossibly high standard - the best in the world. The psychological pressure that adds to a racer's already stressful job is significant and no doubt affect their racing for the next 12 months. If anything, it's a surprise that racers do so well after earning it at all.

So, sure, while there have been a lot of incidents that point towards a Rainbow Curse, it seems to not have much of an effect by the end of the season. Fast racers are fast, who knew?

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