trashcanman

Men still make up the vast majority of mountain bikers in 2018. We don't NEED designated male only rides because all too often, your typical group ride is going to be all-male anyway. It's our responsibility to do everything we can to make mountain biking a welcoming scene for people that aren't part of the majority - be it women, kids, racial minorities, etc. Anything less than that is exclusionary, as it just reproduces the patterns of inequality we already see in the sport. And sorry, but biology just isn't a legitimate excuse for shitty behavior.

Would be extremely curious to hear stats on what percentage of viewers of both DH and XC are mountain bikers. I find WC DH to be fascinating, but I don't think I'd appreciate the same subtleties of line choice, risk management, and technique if I hadn't raced DH myself. On the other hand, XC shows you battles, strategy, and overtaking in real time - things that 1. you don't have to be a mountain biker to appreciate and 2. much more closely resemble more popular racing sports like Supercross, F1, and NASCAR. Could it be that as the global audience for MTB widens, viewers are opting for the sport that's easier to appreciate? An anecdote that supports this idea: when showing non-MTB friends WC DH, I'll sometimes get comments along the lines of "...So you just watch different people ride down the same hill for two hours?"

It's free real estate.

Innovation in the bike world too often comes as a series of incremental, evolutionary steps. Mountain bikers claim to like seeing new tech, but this "new tech" often tends to be a slightly more refined version of an existing concept. Pole should be commended for offering something genuinely new and forward-thinking, as should Pinion, Zerode, Nicolai, Gates, etc.!

Wonder how many derailleurs Sam Shaw broke this weekend...

I think I'd agree if they did a whole EWS round that was urban DH. But the EWS is intended to be eclectic and test the limits and versatility of the athletes and equipment, hence why they decided to start the season off on (I'm fairly certain) the moon last weekend. And as UCI DH rounds seem to get increasingly more homogenous, I'm glad the EWS organizers are mixing things up!

In a parallel universe where gearboxes were the norm, people would laugh off the first derailleur. Why would you want to significantly impair your suspension performance, spend more time wrenching, and spend more money replacing broken/worn parts all for the sake of dropping 1.5 lbs.? I think a lot of the negativity comes down to a unwillingness to learn the nuances of a new shifting system. Rob Metz's quote seems to sum this up pretty well: "But after a while, muscle memory takes over, shifting fades into the background, and the true benefits of the gearbox shine through. At the end of the day, no one high fives each other about the perfect shift, but that perfect roosted corner, that drop you've always been nervous about hitting or just waiting an extra ten seconds at the bottom of a hill for your mates is what brings home the real smiles."

I've spent some time on both Pinon gearboxes and internal hubs, and while they can shift under load, it takes more effort than if you're coasting. You end up just compensating for this by easing off the pedals for a fraction of a second while shifting -- much as as you would to get a derailleur to shift smoothly, but the timing is a bit different. Once I got used to it, it was totally intuitive and I found that the added ability to drop a bunch of gears at once or preselect the right gear for an upcoming trail feature really made it stand out from a derailleur. Gearboxes can no doubt be refined further, but IMO the shifting under load issue is definitely not as big a deal as some make it out to be.

This is awesome! One thought: when you're riding steep stuff or landing nose-heavy, the most important thing you can do is to get your weight as far back as possible to counter the forces trying to send you over the bars. Since Martyn's strapped to his Canyon, he can't really do this. So what if Canyon designed a sliding rail system under his seat, so that Martyn could scoot himself back and forth along the length of the bike to change where his center of gravity was? Anyway, Martyn's a fucking badass, well done!

@rocky-mtn-gman: fertilized