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this all sounds so weird to me since norco was to pause their WC team before signing greg and now they‘re throwing around money like it‘s growing on trees? did they get some funding from outside mountainbiking?

An hour away is close??

Companies are almost always headquartered where their owner wants to live in my experience. When an owner decides to move to Florida, the company usually "finds a competitive advantage in FL" really quickly afterwards. Have to imagine Sainte-George is where Raymond Dutil lives and grew up. And agreed, it's close to amazing riding right now, especially with the recent rise of the Quebec trail centers. And MSE and the ski hills have been big mtb spots for a really long time. But the company is named "Rocky Mountain", and Saint-George on the other side of the river from the big...

They likely do have a CFO. I bet a LinkedIn search would reveal our answer. At minimum they have a fractional CFO or a "VP of Finance" filling those shoes. To be fair to this person, they might be an amazing, pragmatic, disciplined, process oriented person who really did have the insights to guide the company appropriately during this time. The reality is, if the CEO (or board) doesn't want to listen, it doesn't matter how right this person is. The buck usually stops with the CEO (or if it goes to the board, Chairman/a vote).

To me one of the biggest details I was unaware of in the Rocky bankruptcy filing was that design & marketing are in N Vancouver but ownership and management are all the way on the other side of the country in french Saint-George Quebec. Maybe other people knew that but it’s a surprise to me. I’ve actually been to Saint-George, it’s a small town closer to Maine than even Montreal. Tractor repair, Tim Hortons, not much else. Nowhere near any riding that looks like Rocky’s marketing or “spirit”. Rolling farmland on a river, just sort of a nowhere place in...

It's as if the internet discovered this year that some bike companies are badly run and most of them could be considered short-lived

Not crass at all. There’s just too much overlap in this space. Too many companies trying to do the same thing. Bringing it back to the first page of this thread- would Guerilla gravity still be around if they still made reasonably priced aluminum bikes in Denver? That was their niche. They did it well. Then they developed a carbon bike that cost the same as everyone else’s model (great bike, I have one), but no longer anything special aside from being made in Denver. They could have remained made in USA aluminum and dollars to donuts they’d still be...

On hindsight, Jesse Melamed dodged a bullet by moving to Canyon 2 years ago. All the best to the Rocky Mountain and GT riders, mechanics, and staff. I hope we see these bikes racing again in 2025.

Super D was fun! Painful, but fun.

Enduro is dead, long live super D.

I agree. And for many of those reasons, I thought it made the most sense to make GT the D2C MTB brand of the PON portfolio – an "American YT" if you will. It was very surprising to me when they went literally the opposite direction in 2022. Not trying to "Monday morning quarterback" the situation, it just seemed the decision was antithetical to the direction this, like many, industries was/is going (disintermediation).

GT is an interesting one for me because I thought their branding, online marketing, products, and athletes have been consistently strong for 10+ years, since the Atherton's at least. I've ridden a GT and really liked it, and they seemed to be good products. Their struggles seem to be more fundamental to their business structure, i.e. where do you buy one? I don't even know the answer to that question. Back in the day they were an entry level product at Performance Bikes, then at Dicks Sporting Goods. Could you get a GT at REI once they started carrying Cannondale...

Solid breakdown. I was always wondering how there were so many brands trying to eat from the same plate in this industry. In every consumer industry right now we are seeing large brands dominate with distribution and a selection of successful boutiques playing in the value, performance or some super niche space, but the mid-size brands seem to be failing in every industry.

I know this may sound crass, but the Rocky Mountain announcement, much like the GT announcement, doesn’t surprise me. Consolidation in the specialty cycling space has been anticipated for a long time. This consolidation doesn’t always mean brands acquiring other brands; it can also result from major players like Specialized or Trek dominating enough of the market to squeeze out mid-sized competitors. If a brand fails to offer something truly compelling—whether that’s performance, price, brand equity, reliability, or innovation—it’s going to struggle. Unfortunately, the nature of economies of scale makes this consolidation almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. To draw a parallel...

This is just silly; I'm no fan of holding companies or PON but they're the business to make money and they seem to be pretty good at it. It seems wildly unlikely that they'd intentionally let one of their investments whither and die; they'd either kill it quickly or sell it, not sit and watch it devaluate over time.

Another option would be to allow WC pros to race but exclude them from the UCI/WC qualifying points. If WC pro wins a race the qualifying points go to the first non-WC pro.

Apologies if this has been answered, but I dug through the press release and this thread and could not find anything. Are riders on the top World Cup teams allowed to race continental series races as well? In my mind the answer would be no to allow up and comers to gain max points at those races, but I don’t see anything stating that.

this screenshot from a FB group was passed on to me - re: Rocky

Less about the translation than the content itself. Lots of words to say very little about who this company is.