burnermtb

@nedersotan: Yeah, it speaks to the fact that Walmart actually did pull off something pretty special with the Ozark Trail. Walmart's "bigness" - much like Costco - obviously gives it a unique advantage in this "budget" space. It will be interesting to see if big bike manufacturers are big enough and/or care enough to compete in this space. Ostensibly, a brand like Trek is big/connected enough to at least compete in the budget FS space.

Setting aside the FS Ozark Trail - which is indeed interesting - the idea of a new $1K quality entry level HT is nothing particularly special. These options have existed for a long time. Hell, pre-covid, most of them were $1K ($500-$800 was more typical then). It's just that FS has become so ubiquitous that many people write HT off and then complain about affordability. MTB is relatively "affordable" for newbies, provided you have the right expectations (HT, basically). If FS is your expectation, then it gets more expensive - the notable exception being the Ozark Trail.

There's a cyclical quality to this topic. Going all the way back to at least Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973, every so many years, there's some kind of "provocative" effort to try and highlight and then eliminate some artificial "barrier" preventing women's professional sports from competing with men's professional sport. I think even just recently, there was another iteration of a "battle of the sexes" tennis match (that ended with a loss for the woman against an amateur man). Now it appears we are going to test the "ordering" or "primetime" theory, which alleges that the primary explanation for the disparity between men's and women's professional sports is that men's sports are featured more prominently. Perhaps this will be the one to do it, but, it seems unlikely to me and is ultimately a distraction from what is the root cause. Consumers of entertainment generally (being people) have limited bandwidth. This means that entertainment consumers will tend to invest their limited bandwidth in the "best". Unlike most other forms of entertainment, sports tends to have more objective markers. That is, at the end of the day, the whole point of competitive sports - a contest to determine an objective "winner". Which means that as a group, sports consumers will tend to invest their time in highest performing athletes. Those skew overwhelming male. Likewise, the sports consumer skews overwhelmingly male. Meaning, that if you accept this status quo, the challenge facing those seeking to promote competitive women sports is that in most cases, you basically need to convince men en masse to invest their limited bandwidth on lower (often times far lower) performing athletes - which is counter-intuitive to everything we know about consumers. Basically, you're relying on charity viewership, for most consumers at least. And that's a very difficult task, if not impossible. Charity viewership exists, but it tends to be very temporary, case specific, and never competes with "core" consumer bases. On average, there will be more interest among women than men in charity viewership of women's sports. But women's and men's sports consumption tends to be very different. Women's interest in competitive sports tends to be more transient, whereas men's interest in competitive sports tends to be more constant - bordering on obsessive. The real challenge then is how do you make the avg. female sports consumer, effectively, "obsessive" based on a charity viewership model? I don't know what the answer to that is. I don't know that there is one and certainly, provocative ordering seems symbolic at best.

@cro-magnon: @cro-magnon: Another issue is that many of the jobs in the outdoor sports industry - especially if you manage to work your way up (such as that is possible) - can become "non-fun" jobs, which can have the effect of making your personal passion less fun. The reality is, a "non-fun" job doesn't necessarily become fun simply because it's at a bike company rather than say an investment bank. The jobs that are "fun" in the industry tend to be jobs on the periphery of the company, where there's a lot of turnover, etc. And those jobs usually pay poorly, but with perks that seem great to the uninitiated. Here in VT, Burton historically gets trashed by many locals who allege it justified deplorably low pay by a season pass, doggie day care, and the privilege of living in VT. I think it may be changing of late, but it's a business model that many in the outdoor industry have employed historically, relying on a well meaning, young, passionate, but naive employee base.

Weird take since I believe e-bike adoption in Europe far outpaces it in the US - though it certainly is increasing in the US and I think growth will continue. However, where I'm at, anecdotally, eMTB adoption is still a very tiny share of the riders I encounter. I'd guess maybe 2% - and that's pretty generous. And those I am seeing tend to be older riders who are actually finding eMTB's as a way to re-start, continue, or increase exercise, due to health or other issues they encounter as they age.

As I recall, wasn't it BP that coined the phrase "carbon footprint"? The more cynical among us might assume that was an intentional distraction by making individuals fight amongst themselves over the extent to which, say, their biking habits contribute to climate change in a futile effort to combat the problem. It seems to have worked, given the sheer amount of effort dedicated to carbon footprint ideology. I'm even seeing hot takes about the carbon footprint of dog ownership. If we were to find that we had grossly underestimated the Earth's mass and based on re-calculations, we discovered that we would sail out of orbit in 150 years, it strikes me that reducing one's carbon footprint help mitigate climate change is a bit like shoveling dirt from your yard and hiring Space X to ship it to space in order to reduce the Earth's mass.

@hvmatt: I find DH MTB’ing much better to watch than most mainstream sports. But, it appears the vast majority of people in the world disagree, which is why there’s far less revenue generated for MTB’ing than say football. There’s always going to be people like us (cool people :)), spending our Sunday mornings huddled on our phones watching a live stream of an obscure (to most) bike race taking place three time zones away to see if a racer nobody has ever heard of wins a race nobody has ever heard of. And nobody understands us and we like it that way. But, the reality is, these little niche - cool as they are - communities and interests will never generate as much revenue for the simple reason of scale. Women’s sports viewership is niche. It doesn’t have to be per se. As I’ve suggested, it’s really on women, not men, to change that. Women make up roughly half the planet. Women could collectively decide to become obsessed with women's sports like men are with men’s sports and the money would flow. They haven’t despite decades of pushing it on young girls. Female interest is just different. I’m a lawyer and I can’t tell you how often I’m shocked to find out that some of the most brilliant and accomplished female lawyer colleagues of mine are binge watching “Real Housewives”. That’s an example of a female dominated market with insane cash flow.

Individual preference is always a thing. If my daughter's "college cup" soccer championship is on TV and I can't attend live, I'm watching. And women's tennis viewership has had occasions where it outperforms men's. But, outside of that, is your typical viewer going to watch the men's world cup final or the women's college cup final?

In terms of compensation, professional sports is entertainment at the end of the day. So, it's useful to compare this to more obvious forms of entertainment like, say, a musician. If Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber each go on their own tours, one tour will generate X in gross revenue and one will generate Y. And they won't be equal. And which one grosses more will, fundamentally, depend on interest. More interest, more ticket sales, more gross revenue, etc. So if Taylor Swift blows out Justin Bieber in gross revenue, we wouldn't say anything unfair happened. We'd say Taylor Swift sold more tickets to her shows. Women's professional sports is primarily held back, compensation wise, by two forces, neither of which can reasonably be categorized as discrimination: 1.) limited bandwidth; and 2.) sex based interest differences. We all have limited bandwidth, and limited bandwidth will always favor the "top" of any given thing. Because of the profound physical advantages men have over women, men will always dominate the top of athletic endeavors. And so, your typical sports fan will tend to use their limited bandwidth to focus on the top. There are exceptions of course, by they tend to have some sort of vested or personal interest in watching lower tier sports. Which leads into the second point, women will tend to have the most vested or personal interest in the issue of equal compensation for women's sports. However, there are profound sex-based interest differences and one of those is consumption of sports as entertainment. Women, as a group, are nowhere near men in terms of sports consumption for entertainment. And so, if the group that has the most interest in equal compensation for women's sports does not watch sports at the rate men do, then it will never be equal. Full stop.

@jsnfschr: I think there is unique pressure put on young women and girls in modern culture to perform physically not simply out of individual interest, but out of some broader societal goal. It's been dubbed the over-empowerment trap, where women and girls are not simply navigating their own interests, but rather feel the pressure to "break new ground" and be a "bad-ass" or prove they can hang with the boys because that messaging is so predominate in modern culture. Sure, every athlete is ultimately responsible for their own decisions, but it is an added pressure that is, although generally well-intentioned, possibly harmful. And yes, some men crashed out too. And fair enough. But, as a practical matter, the optics of the entire field of women crashing out, sans 1, is not good on many different levels - especially for those on the ground. If you follow any female riders closely, the sense I get is that both actual injury and the fear of injury is a somewhat more elevated struggle for female riders and this will not help with that.