Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
Five lucky people will be selected at random to win a Vital MTB t-shirt.
Thanks in advance,
The Vital MTB Crew
between pilgrim and wibmer, canyon owns the views! pilgrim's custom shifter looks rad.
Canyon has Tomomi Nishikubo too.
Joe Connell off Orange.
I haven't watch all Sam Pilgrim Video in the last year (or two) but he is no more with magura ?
no, He was dropped awhile ago. believe they had different views on what Sam should be doing. - kinda like haibike and Sam.
Good to see the bike was infact a spectral(no doubt anyway as it was poorly hidden)
Miranda Miller off Kona. No idea if she's going to do a full race program in 2023, but probably not given the last couple of years.
Mille was in a gnarly road bike crash...
I just want to see the MVP collab!
Kona must be on another level of hurting. They have done nothing but just drop athletes over the years, made some real strange bike lineup choices and have fallen so flat and far behind on many things.
Can you F'ing imagine going from the company that honestly changed it all with the OG process lineup to being so irrelevant at this time.
Hate seeing it, loved that process lineup and the earlier carbon operators were sexy.... Maybe their new owners can help pull off a phoenix like move.. I hope they are ready to build a big fire to get that bird flying again.
young talent for the team
Who bought Kona in the end? I heard it was for sale more or less three years ago already.
Kent Outdoor
The group has roots in water sports, but now includes Arbor Snowboards, HO Sports and Connelly Skis
https://kentoutdoors.com/#page-section-61de09c70be3261d35fc7c1b
Who is then owned by Seawall Capital. It all rolls up to the venture capitalists in the end.
https://www.seawallcap.com/
I see both GCN and GMBN Tech have said that they will have the racing this year.
GCN more specifically saying that mountain bike racing will be on GCN+ and GMBN Tech saying that they'll be at the races doing behind the scenes stuff plus interviews etc.
It’s hard to come back from a reputation of snapped head tubes and shitty bikes. I broke an operator in half at the head tube. Let’s just say I’ll never sip the Kona koolaid again.
GCN have a tie up with Eurosport for their cycle racing coverage. Eurosport have been advertising DH over the last few months. Discovery own Eurosport and someone else owns the lot of them.
I remember someone in the know telling me that before the process and operator breathed some new life into the company, the owners were going to tap out. They really hit their stride after the very brief life of the original process with the 2nd gen Process but they seemed to get way to expensive suddenly in the 3rd gen and lost what made the 2nd gen so special being a mix of great geo for the time and pretty well priced.
Otherwise the most new Kona's I've seen lately have been commuter based dews and adventure bikes, which are some of the coolest and most appealing options from big company's. Maybe they're focusing on bread and butter.
It ready did feel like Miranda just had a bit longer on her contract and they didn't want to put any money into racing so they just let her do her thing.
If only he had seen Katy Winton going through the same thing...
Hopefully him and Leigh Johnson find their way back to EWS. Too talented to be lost to the E-EWS sideshow but money talks.
I am just wondering if proper bike building and bike maintainance was included in his contract. I thinkg Canyon does not want that "loose" image around their bikes - I mean creaking bikes, sketchy builds, mismatched parts, "don't give a fuck about it, it still rolls" attitude that was so hilarious to watch but may be not so marketable.
I think Canyon UK will maintain and build his bikes and they will always be on point.
But I can be wrong
This support concept is flawed from the get-go. There's no tie in to normal riders or to casual or focused athletes, other than providing distraction to one's individualized YouTube rabbit hole. Riders having enough discipline to avoid social media will never see Sam Pilgrim and others in this brief position.
One hundred and fifty percent certain that there's not a single rider out there who only will watch Sam Pilgrim on YT, so I don't really get how allowing someone tenure to occupy a slot at Canyon Bikes like this actually is moving Canyon, or sustained-riding, forward.
FWIW - when finding these 'exclusive' uploads on TY, they get introduced to the 'settings' icon and disappear. I get it, Sam has been a competitor and a good one but riding 1/2" plywood bikes, continually riding a fork past its point of failure, for example - does more harm than good to Mountain Bike.
This is not free skiing, where it's a rider and a brief moment with nature. This type of display is something that's fabricated and forced and in no way natural. A waste of resources.
I get what you are trying to point out and I can relate to some of it however I would also disagree a bit here. I think he did HUGE with e-bikes in general - do you remember the constant noise from 4-5-6 years ago? For example: e-bikes are too heavy, sluggish, therefore it can be jumped properply, berms can not be slayed to death, very bad handling etc. etc. He jumped on probably one of the worse e-bikes ever on the market and made it all happen.
I am far from telling that he did this on his own, but I reckon he helped a lot with the acceptance of e-bikes for proper MTB riding. Which I consider a great accomplishment.
And I guess social media and following people like Sam is high up on the list of what people do with their time. It is a lot of eyeballs. And not just YT, over all of the social media, so Facebook and Instagram included. The amount of people scrolling through Instagram is insane and it's a freaking rabbit hole.
Very few people these days try to have constructive discussions on... Forums!?! Consider yourself out of the norm and in a bubble.
I hope they won't be the only ones allowed to do "behind the race" coverage. I just find their presenters insufferable to watch and they lean into the clickbait way too much for my tastes.
I very much enjoyed most of the videos with Ric McLaughlin, can't say so about anything on the GMBN channel.
Isn't that the way with Kona though? They are all the hype for a few years (OG Stinky etc. in the early -00's) to being absolutely irrelevant for some time (Magic link anyone?) to coming back to being the bees knees (Process, Carbon operator, gravel bikes) and then back into the abyss again.
Looks like this hasn't been posted on here yet.
My thoughts exactly and with the new Fluid they released this year it appears they could be back on the upswing... Now back to the team rumors!
the fluid is from norco, or has kona a bike with the same name?
This post sounds like it was written in 2007. There's about 15 years of data surrounding the proliferation of social media. These companies aren't stupid, money is invested where the impact is most likely. I'd wager that collectively more people consume bike related content through social media (Youtube, Instagram, etc) than regularly stream live race coverage. Who cares that no one will exclusively, only watch Sam's content when there's millions of people who will consume it along with other bike related content?
They are Private Equity, not venture capitalists. There is a difference. I just left a bike/moto industry brand that took on private equity, then got acquired completely by a larger private equity group.
Post a reply to: 2023 TEAM RUMORS