The Hottest MTB Polls Answered by You Over the Years

Who doesn't like a good poll? Maybe THAT question should be asked in a poll to know for sure, but what we know for a fact is that thousands of you DO answer our polls, whether on the homepage or in an article.

Over the years, we've run lots of polls, and we thought it would be fun to take a look back at some of the questions we've asked - and more importantly, your answers. How many fingers did you use to brake with in 2011? Had you ridden a 650B bike in 2013? Did you align your tire logos in 2015? These were all existential ponderings that deserved an answer!

2009 - The First Ever Poll on Vital

This may or may not be true, but in its current form, this is the oldest poll currently in our database. As one is wont to do after one launches an international MTB website, we asked "How many bikes do you currently own?" in June of 2009:

A bit later that same year, we felt a pressing need to figure out if skinsuits should be allowed at DH World Cups. We wonder if those answers would have come out different if only Fox was making the not-a-skinsuit skinsuit back then...

2011 - Braking News

In 2011, there were some good brakes around. Not everybody had them though, as you can clearly see from our poll asking riders how many fingers they use for braking. Imagine 79 riders with two fingers on their 2025 Mavens...it wouldn't end well!

In 2011, 4X ceased to be a World Cup discipline. We asked what should replace it, and it warms our hearts to see that even back then, Enduro was slightly more popular than Freestyle Razor Scootering:

2013 - A New Wheel Size

In 2013, the 650B wheel was the hot new thing. 29ers had already been around for some time, but they were still suffering from poor component availability and weird geometry, so the 27.5-inch version was heralded as the best-of-both-worlds savior. The majority of you still hadn't ridden one at that time though:

2014 - Back to Basics

In 2014, the most pressing topic on our mind was apparently to find out if you knew how to mount your bike from either side. We take great pride in our educational role here at Vital, and we get a little warm and fuzzy inside when we picture those 23 riders discovering that you can, in fact, mount your bicycle from both sides:

2015 - How To Make Your Bike Look Dope in Photos

There's a very-much-spoken rule among self-respecting bike builders that calls for tire logos to be aligned with the valves and graphics on your rims. In 2015, we wanted to find out who among you knew about the correct way of doing this, and who were the psychopaths:

2016 - The Great New Wheel Size Flop

Encouraged by the success of the 27.5-inch wheel and hungry for the next big thing that could be used by the marketing departments as a compelling reason to make people want to change bikes again, the industry dove headfirst into the Plus tire. In stark contrast to the claims of the brochures, which included more comfort and better grip, the Plus tire quickly disappeared when it turned out to actually just make everything worse. Quite a few made it out into nature before anybody actually realized that though, as evidenced by your answers to our poll question of whether you had ever seen one on the trails in 2016:

2017 - The Year of the Geo

No, the Geo isn't one of the creatures in the Chinese zodiac, but it was one of the hottest topics of 2017. We were curious if riders were jumping on the whole "longer-lower-slacker" trend back then (a typical size L from the years immediately before 2017 probably had around 440-450mm of reach, at the most), so we asked you if you had increased your usual reach number as a result of modern geo changes:

Another huge, geo-adjacent change in 2017 was the advent of the 29er in DH racing. We asked you how many wagon wheelers you thought would end up on the podium in the first World Cup of the 2017 season, results of that poll below. The rain actually disrupted that race, gifting Alex Fayolle the only World Cup win of his career, with Mark Wallace, Marcelo Gutierrez, Flo Payet and Connor Fearon rounding out the podium. Only the Santa Cruz Syndicate actually raced a 29er in Lourdes that year, with Loris Vergier setting the fastest time in qualifying which would eventually open the floodgates and send every other team scrambling to roll out their 29ers later in the season or the following year:

Later in that same season, we asked you which V10 Loris should ride at Val di Sole (because sometimes these elite-level riders need the opinions of random people on the internet to help them make those race-winning decisions):

Loris opted for the 27.5 version and ended up on the podium, showing the value of the collective knowledge of Vital MTB forum members even back then!

2018 - More Geo Evolution and New Race Winners

After making bikes longer and slacker for a while, the bike industry also woke up to the fact that we didn't really need seat tube angles inspired by road bikes, and that top tube length was not really such a crucial number for bikes that you only sit on while climbing, pretty much. Thus we asked you how steep the seat tube should be on your enduro bike:

In hindsight, we should perhaps have added an option for those who ride their Harleys IN the bike park as well, but that seemed very niche at the time. So instead, we also asked you who you thought would be a first-time winner of an elite male DH World Cup in 2018 - shoutout to the 48 people who had Amaury as their pick, he went on to not only win his first World Cup at Fort William that year, but he won the next two races as well! Loris Vergier did also win his first World Cup that year, but for the purposes of this poll, Amaury was the winning ticket:

2019 - More Armchair Quarterbacking

Since we had already proven our worth by selecting the correct wheel size for Loris Vergier to ride at the Val di Sole World Cup in 2017, for 2019 we thought we should chime in on what frame size Aaron Gwin should run that year. Seems logical, why would one of the most dominant riders of that era know anything about frame sizes, better ask the forums! (He ended up mostly riding the L, showing once again that Vital is a unique source of set-up tips even for the most accomplished of racers):

On the topic of forum members and their opinions, after enduring years of bullying by the keyboard warriors Leogang finally added a whole new off-camber (*GASP*) section to their track in an effort to appease those accusing it of being too bike-parky (MTB-specific adjective that translates loosely to "needs moar roots"). Did that make the track legit now, we asked (41 of you still felt they were rowdier-than-thou at this point):

2021 - Are You E?

The great e-bike debate was still raging on in 2021. We're betting this poll would get different answers today:

2022 - The Great Stagnation Arrives

In 2022, the bike industry couldn't make enough bikes. The writing, however, was on the wall - ignore the Vital forums at your own peril, bike industry!

Question: Are you on pace with the latest bike industry advances?

So there you have it, some fascinating insights into the evolution of Vital MTB public opinion over the last 15 years or so. What should we ask you about next?