Alicia Leggett's 2024 Predictions

Hey all, I'm here again to take a stab at guessing what will happen next year. No tarot cards or tea leaves went into these guesses. Would they be better if they had some otherworldly backing? That's for you to decide.


Drivetrain development is about to get more interesting.

Since I first started mountain biking, drivetrain development has remained an area of our little bike world that's seen almost no change. The technology has stayed profoundly boring, working essentially the same way it always has. The rear derailleur moves the chain around on the cassette, which changes the amount the rear wheel moves for each pedal stroke. Okay, cool. The front derailleur has mostly disappeared in mountain biking, I guess there's that, but otherwise, we're due for some updates.

Then we hit the point when apparently all the engineers were bored too! Yippie!

This 'prediction' is a little bit of a lazy cop-out because claiming drivetrain development will become more interesting is a little bit like predicting paint will dry or wheels will stay round. The bar was set low.

Regardless, we've seen some action.

First, SRAM casually updated the derailleur hanger concept, giving bike manufacturers real incentive to design around a universal standard, then once SRAM had sold us all on that Trojan horse, the brand conveniently released their new wireless electronic Transmission groups that happened to fit all those bikes. Well played, SRAM.

And then there's the gearbox situation. We've seen some development of ideas like gearbox-motor combinations, which I think eliminate some of the downsides of both gearboxes and motors. There seems to be to a lot of new momentum in the drivetrain world, and I, for one, love to see it.


YouTube and social media will continue to take over as the ways to succeed as an athlete.

I'm not the first and I won't be the last to point out that being a professional or high-level athlete is changing. Today, athletic success seems almost unrelated to race results and has everything to do with how savvy a rider is at showing their accomplishments to the world. This point will make some mad, I'm sure, but it's real. If a rider wins a race, that happens in a single location during a condensed time period. If that same rider publishes a shreddy video on the internet, that video and the comments will live on, be shared by those with similar interests, and capture way more eyeballs than a single race result ever could.

Throw in a recent experience like the pandemic canceling all races and the visibility gained by event-goers starts to seem essentially irrelevant.

Today, I'd suspect that companies invest way more budget on influencers than people who would describe themselves strictly as athletes, and yet existing as a professional athlete, and only that, still involves an astonishing amount of playing the influencer game.

I remember that from when I was doing the racing thing, and I've continued to watch it play out over the last few years since. (At least, until I 95% quit using social media in the last year because the part of my brain that it captured seems to have thankfully gone offline.)

All of that makes sense and a lot of those decisions are what I'd do if I worked in marketing. I love the sport of mountain biking and it would be a tragedy to lose the pure savagery of competition, but the athletes might need to evolve to be less financially dependent on brands subsidizing our entire sport by using it as a marketing platform.


The industry will continue to struggle, but it's not all doom and gloom.

The number of bike brands that have run into financial trouble recently is ludicrous. We've seen many, many brands restructure to some extent and pull back their support for racers. This is the fall after the Covid-induced spike, when demand for bikes sharply increased and companies ramped up production but then were left hanging when the demand dropped off. Things feel odd and precarious right now, and of course there are some serious consequences for the existence of the brands we know and love, the stability of the industry, and the racing world mentioned above that depends on brands' subsidies.

Still, they say every cloud has a silver lining or something kind of like that (though I've spent time in clouds while paragliding and most cloud linings seem to me to be cold and white). The silver lining (arguable bright side) here is that the industry's recent financial trouble will spur types of creativity we have not seen before.

I don't know what we'll see. (If I could predict that, maybe I'd be able to make it myself.) But I do think we're at a point when the old tactics have stopped working, and that'll push everyone into figuring out new ways to do things, whether that's figuring out athlete support, making products that work better, approaching the sport in a way that's healthy in the long term... the possibilities are endless, and I think we have the unique chance to take advantage of that right now.


Next year will be better than this one.

I mean, it's bound to be, right?

Here's another one about as safe as saying wheels will stay round, and this one's entirely subjective, but this is my list, so I'll roll with it. This has not been the easiest year on record and it would be just too absurd for the next one to be even worse. I celebrated last New Year's by noticing it was the end of the month, loosely acknowledging it to myself, going to bed early, and carrying on with the brain rehab program I was in, the same exact person I'd been the day and the year before. I'd just been released from the latest hospital, but turns out, the rehab project felt like it was just starting. The rest of the year didn't stray too far from the recovery theme, but despite being mostly kind of grim, there were some real, mindblowing, meaningful, just plain cool highlights, too.

In 2024, I'll do my best to lean into the uncertain moments, keep learning, keep growing, and have those little beams of light keep coming back into my world. The best part is that all of that seems realistic.

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