All

How are brands so far off on what is needed for compression and rebound damping with all the development time and money behind these products?

I started a petition for Gee Atherton to please chill out already: https://www.change.org/gee_please_stop

I'm friends with an Ex- WC racer who raced the same years as Nico, she told me a few years ago that he did this even with his tires. He would figure out which tires were best for the World Champs course and would race them for every race leading up to Worlds, regardless of conditions. Wet race...same tires, dry race...same tires, crazy rock gardens...same tires.

teamrobot set a record for forum thumbs up, so here's a preview of what's to come (unlisted, only for the special people in this forum topic) regarding taking out pawls and testing ochain.

Telemetry is the new dampening.

I don’t care about seeing full runs.

The rules around this seem very ambiguous (or people at the UCI aren't clear on what telemetry actually is). By the letter of the rules it seems fine but I know Nick at Downamics/MucOff Younguns has inquired several times about running our data acquisition systems (which have no transmission ability) for race runs and has been refused. It's now a situation where you can run electronic suspension which collects data AND acts on it while not being able to just collect data. Feels a bit inconsistent to me.

Gwin (re)injured his foot during track walk. Bad luck. Still no official announcement but I'd be surprised if he races a WC this year.

afaik, domestic races with high enough UCI classification award UCI points to successful finishers an opportunity to race a world cup, so the "feeder" system exists in some way already. it would *seem* that points don't get you into a WC in '25, only being on a select team. (the domestic/regional race promoter has to agree to pay for the UCI classification to award points and not many do that these days)

Not magically, but maybe with 10 years of hard work, developing your race craft, etc you can get there. https://www.rootsandrain.com/rider63964/dakotah-norton/results/filters/… If the last 10 years was limited to just the top 20 or 30 guys racing, I don't see how Dak gets to where he is today.

For years I had CX neighbors on the Blood Vampire whatch list. Vlad did it wrong. It’s absolutely impossible to forget to update them. It’s your own personal responsibility- nobody “forgets”. No excuses

This is a major responsibility of the athlete at that level. They all know it and deal with it. It's part of their daily/weekly routine. For someone at the level of a Van Der Poel or whatever, they probably have a very close trusted associate that manages some of it. But Vlad likely does it himself (as most all of the XC pros in MT and knows the importance of it. If you followed doping in road cycling over the decades, Whereabouts checks are VERY important to the process. Athletes used to know when they were going to get tested...

Chasing that "Into jeeping now into mountain bikes" segment of the market that popped up from 2020.

That Bilstein patent looks super interesting... I played with a few frequency sensitive valves at RS but could never get them to work smoothly and/or be durable. They would ride great on small bump but then you'd hit something that 'bottomed' the frequency sensitive part and it would bang or spike the damping. Would be cool to see Bilstein enter the MTB market.

This isn't an official Olympics' site, is riddle with errors so I wouldn't take much notice of it. To start off the 1st sentence is incorrect "The 2032 Brisbane Olympics will be the first time that mountain biking has been included in the Olympic Games". XCO has been a part of the games since the Atlanta 1996.

Kinda shocked at the number of comments on PB blaming the UCI. If a pro athlete can't stay on top of their wearabouts filing for drug testing they must be hiding something. Like okay they fail twice in a year and then get their crap together, but to fail three times knowing the consequences is crazy.

1. Bruni has been getting top 5's for 12 years. 10 Top 5 WC finishes on a Lapierre. 2. I said zero to defend "newer/flashier". Where did you read anything defending them in my post 3. Bruni's program is nothing new. The French receive direct educational, training, coaching & even financial assistance on the World stage to prepare for races like World Champs & European Champs. The French DH program is legendary & the top racers have access to Lance Armstrong/Jan Ulrich level physical science and as stated above...line coaches, timers on course, physio and on and on. It's lost...

Is it suprising that one of the top teams, that signed a French champion, that trains incredibly hard and has a team so much larger than others they have private videographers on course to find lines and do comparison timing is successful? The bike is definitely great, but with the Specialized resources, training regime, coaching, support staff etc, he would get podiums on any frame.