Incoming roadie talk, but trust me it will all make sense in a moment.
In recent years, road teams such as Mathieu van der Poel’s Alpecin Fenix and Tom Pidcock’s
Ineos Grenadiers began to dip their toes into cross-country mountain biking. This off season however, the floodgates seem to have opened and now both Jumbo Visma and B&B Hotels p/b KTM have joined the circuit through
Milan Vader and
Victor Koretzky respectively.
Why is this? Well, a new breed of racers is emerging at the top of road cycling. Rather than staring at their stems and tempo-ing to power as part of a train of riders, they’re powerful, explosive, unpredictable, and recover quickly to disrupt the rhythm of their rivals. Riders like Alaphilippe, Van Aert, Stybar, and Van Der Poel all got their start in cyclocross and are now dominating the road racing circuit. None of these riders are yet
seriously challenging for the most prestigious Grand Tour races, where lightweight climbers and time triallists are still kings, but in the Classics, Monuments and shorter Stage Races, these riders are reigning supreme.
Cyclocross’s sustained, hour-long efforts on sharp muddy climbs earned these riders their strong legs, while maneuvering skinny tyres through slimy mud granted them superior bike handling skills to their more robotic rivals. If that skillset sounds familiar, it’s probably because cross-country mountain biking isn’t too far removed from the winter sport from Northern Europe. If you take cyclocross but make the courses techier, the climbs longer and the bikes a bit more suited to the terrain, then you basically have cross-country mountain biking. Even with the more technical courses we’re seeing in cross-country these days, XC racing isn’t a huge leap from cyclocross, which is why it has started to attract the attention of road cycling teams.
So, what’s the plan here? Is cross-country just going to become a feeder series for road racing and all of its best talents will be frittered away to grind themselves up alpine passes for a living?
Well, hopefully not. Van Der Poel and Van Aert still race cyclocross races because they value it as an important part of their race calendar and it keeps those skills sharp through the winter. Similarly, Pidcock was able to twist the arm of Ineos into starting a mountain bike program so he could target the Olympics and both Vader and Koretzky have said they will race on dirt alongside the road next year, albeit with a reduced calendar focussing on the biggest races.
Victor Koretzky won two World Cups in 2021, but will be racing fewer World Cups with his new team in 2022
XCO racing itself is also growing in viewership and prestige. Red Bull is never too open with its viewing figures but we know its streams passed 1 million views in 2015 and that it grew by 50% in 2018 alone. Add on top of this the drama and excitement of the Olympic Games and it’s clear mountain biking is a sport on the rise that team sponsors will want high-profile riders to be involved in. In fact, the inclusion of road teams is likely to be an even bigger boost for the discipline. Jumbo Visma has an annual team budget of €20 million, which we imagine is bigger than the rest of the XCO World Cup teams put together. Add to that the reported €50 million budget of Ineos Grenadiers, and you can start to imagine a significant financial boost for the sport of XC. The sport should also benefit from an influx of curious new fans that have come from the world of road cycling, who will further bolster its growing fanbase.
It’s going to be a very exciting few years in cross-country racing.
Be safe be well,
Incognito Robin
And if I wreck myself on the trails, it's basically 100% my own fault. On the other hand, I can follow all the rules and still be turned into road piazza by someone behind the wheel of a car/truck starring at their phone.
Be safe be well,
Incognito Robin
Be safe be well,
Incognito Robin
Be safe be well,
Incognito Robin
Be safe be well,
Incognito Robin
I want mountain biking to grow but - selfishly - I don’t want it to grow tooo much. It’s sweet that my local trails are quiet. It’s dope that I see my fave pros in Whistler walking around normally and I can go up to them and say hi. No need to buy tickets to crankworx, UCI DH or XC events! Just walk up to the tape! My favourite NHL, NFL players and teams? Over $100 to watch them from the nosebleeds and there’s no way those guys are just chilling on a sidewalk patio because they’d get mobbed.
IMO - F&*# it, hold it on the snow and ice...but like the Olympics a few years back in CAN, prob a good chance it will be proper mud and slush with global warming anyways...
I think the reality is that the city's where the winter Olympics are held typically have lower elevation areas where it's going to be viable. But in Belgium, when it does snow, it's hard packed, a few inches, mixed with mud and really cold, condition you can actually ride in.
Or get it in the summer Olympics and get someone to leave the sprinklers on over night..
opps sorry boss ;-)
That will filter most of the pure roadies out. Sagan may be another story
Change the courses to make it so that you get an actual procentual acvantage if you're a better rider. No you gain what, top 10sek but mostly 5sek in a lap (Nino/Neff/Rissveds etc) but it's out of a 10-15min lap. If you could gain 2min (on a 15min lap)on other riders it would start to be a better course
It's rarely race winning in the most immediate sense (getting to the last DH first usually does the tric), but it adds up if you can make your competition close gaps by putting in extra watts lap after lap.
Also: It's world cup racing with the best of the best. We tend to think a little bit black and white of the skilled riders as miles ahead of the rest, but they are simply the best among a really good field. With bad skills, you're not there racing, because no fitness makes up for that. Riders improve their game constantly, if they notice a weak point in themselves and the worst descender is still a pretty good one.
If they were to put a 200m or so technical part, on the flat bit of the course, where you would gain time by being a good rider but not by running.
I am not sure if bigger 'dare' features are the solution. That's not what XC is about and there's already more of that than there's ever been. (On friggin' XC bikes!) If you make the features even bigger, riders will quickly adapt and it'll hardly be a time discriminator. The only change would be more injury risk.
From what I see it's still mayhem and hard to pass people during the first lap.
Believe me I've tried.
Kate fans are a bit simple.
They will be happy to know she is doing yoga as we speak.
Diplomatically said.
Former world champs will finish minutes behind due to their inability to keep up with the best.
Assuming the courses are not overly-technical, raw aerobic capacity is a huge benefit to winning XC races.
He is quite the beast though... Maybe he could get closer if he would do a Tom Dumoulin and lose a lot of muscle mass, but he'll allways be a tall, big guy, as is Mathieu van der Poel. The fact that they are up there winning races that they shouldn't on paper is impressive enough.
I'm glad there's enough money in the sport that athletes can choose the path they love, but I am a bit worried about Pinarello re-entering the mountain bike market and pushing top bikes past the $20,000 level. #pworks #fahk
I would say its because some of their riders just have MTB oder CX background.
20 years ago there were Cadel Evans and Michael Rasmussen, 30 ago John Tomac. Now they are named van der Poel, Pidcock, van Aert or Koretzky. Not a new phenomenon.
Riding urban roads in europe littered with road furniture with 200 other people at the same time requires a pretty dialed set of bike handling skills. Sure, mountain biking and CX are nice and help with some skills, but it's a marginal gain on the road. Mountain bike skills might help with some bunny hops here and there, but lots of road riders can do those, and I suspect everyone in the pro ranks can. It's a skill you see over and over in races as kerbs seemingly come out of nowhere when you're riding that fast in a group.
Descending big mountian passes is also completely different than mountain biking. Mountian biking would help when descending a pass, but so would just road biking.
Road biking - exhaust fumes, especially the black diesel crap that comes out the busted hemi redneck trucks
Mountain biking - worry about ghost bears and cougars
Road biking - worry about getting run over by cars and rednecks with their jacked up 4x4's
Mountain biking - obstacles include: trees, rocks, drops, roots, and other fun challenges; no trails are the same
Road biking - follow the white lines and hope not to be hit by a car or break your rims in potholes; all roads look pretty much like the other.
I'd still ride my road bike to get the cardio in, but nothing beats the workout from mountain biking.
do you have friends to ride with
do you have a proper road bike
what road hurt you?
(Especially in South Africa…. All blinged out on S-Works or similar racing-snake bikes with ZERO technical riding abilities…)