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How organizers still approach elite sports events as standalone products instead of marketing assets still blows my mind. In most cases, a World Cup weekend will never generate positive revenue if you only look at the direct cashflow during the event itself. The picture changes once you factor in media coverage, long term tourism, bike sales, brand image, destination marketing and overall communication value. A World Cup should be part of a bigger strategy and not treated as a one weekend business case. If a region has no long term MTB vision, no plans to grow the scene, infrastructure or...

Watching the first women take to the track after watching riders like Asa and Jackso is going to be immensely underwhelming many will just turn off the broadcast It's just a token virtue signal by the organisers

Can Special Ed bring in a substitute racer for 6 weeks? "...and suddenly Ken Roczen did appear"

Yesterday I spoke with a guy who rode a couple of EDRs and would always ride xtr mech since forever but he was on a sram. He said not only the chain slap was unbearable on the new di2 xtr but he would also drop chains pretty much daily, to the extend the top of his crank which cought the chain became all scratched... The shifting was absolutely amazing but the reliability is horrible and he also noticed shimano sponsored enduro pros would run full dh chain tensioners or STFUs just to keep the chain on, which is mindboggling how...

Renthal’s DHC pedals

New lower-profile Crank Brothers DH/Trail pedals on Roger's rig?

Banshee up to something new, the shock cage looks different. Maybe a metric shock uodate?

You are correct, thanks for making mention before I could catch up in this thread. On longer climbs I would take the chain off but most times I just wouldn't care to. The bigger problem was the chain length in my largest rear cog when using the lower guide, only a problem during climbing though. The system was great while descending. But I just run the ochain now instead of the lower guide because it's manages the chain whipping and is less faff.

Torrent is clean. Bottle rocket is adjustable freeride. Quake is a capable race geo. (Iirc) Different bikes for different folks . I freeride and park my race bikes - and xc ride my enduro bike. But the world does seem to want FUN 27.5 park bikes and the racers do seem to want FAST DH WEAPONS. Why can’t we have both? The marketing isn’t even for us. There are literally armies of 15 year old boys AND GIRLS! Getting really into modern freeride, just riding down shit and off shit and being park rats in jnco jeans where I live...

Most geometry adjustments are flaw not a feature to some people. I have ridden enough bikes over the years that I can adjust to a few mm or a degree here or there quickly. What I want is the simplest, easiest, most reliable frame. Adding in flip chips and adjustable headset cups just adds more places for tolerance stack-up to fail and creaks (or worse) to show up. Based on the shear volume of warranty experiences I’ve had to deal with, no thanks. I’d probably pay the extra ~$400 for the Norco over a Transition to NOT have flip chips.

The Torrent isn't for bike nerds. It's for people that set it and forget it and spend their day lapping A-Line and Dirt Merchant. And for that purpose, the Torrent sounds like a perfect bike. Simple, reliable (hopefully) and affordable.

From the downtime podcast, apparently when Loic crashed he was wearing an alpinestars airbag system. The tech MX system is on the market already (Barcia was wearing it during is insane supercross crash ealier this year), but it would be fantastic to see mtb-focused versions as well.

I will probably get flamed for this, and will offer the caveat that I have only been skimming this page, but I feel like these bikes are great propositions and are in my eyes cool bikes because they’re made to be cheap and practical workhorses for younger demographics that don’t have as much disposable income and want a playful park bike that they can maintain themselves. Maybe I’m just haven’t been following the thread well enough, but I don’t see why the ebike bit is necessary to explain the appeal. Not everyone can afford bougie boutique racing machines, or ebikes...

Extremely hot take in the bad way lol. Marin makes awesome bikes, I regularly check them out. Transition as well, albeit a little spendier but also more dialed (imo). The only reason I don’t buy either is because I already own a 6 year old Norco that has given me zero reasons to spend money on a new bike,

That's a hot take on things. A lot of us don't care if a bike is inside the box or outside it, we just want it to be a good time. Oh, and pretty much all mountain bikers are uncool. That's fine with me, I don't really like the cool people anyway.

I have to admit, I do not love the side profile of some of the 32" bikes that are coming out. They end up looking like XS bikes with cramped triangles and kinked bottom/top tubes. Hopefully more progressive geo will enable these things to look like something other than a 2010-2012 era niner.

I think there's a business case to be made for lower-cost park bikes now that many peoples' primary bikes are eMTBs. Back in the day, my cohort of friends had a trail bike and a DH bike. Later, I feel like it became an enduro bike and a lighter trail bike (aka downcountry). Now, I imagine a lot of mountain bikers' pairings will either be a park bike and an eMTB, or a XC bike and an eMTB.

Neither of those bikes are race-oriented. The bottlerocket is a freeride bike 27.5 front/rear. And the other is a Marin.

Not trying to be argumentative but I do completely disagree with that first point. Quake... MAYBE, but anybody wanting to race I think will look elsewhere. The bottlerocket is blatantly marketed as not a race bike. I guess the status DH isn't talked about but I think its a sleeper sick bike. Maybe because there's one at my LBS that's for sale for 3k out the door. The industry needs as many cheap aluminum double crown bikes as it can handle. Bike park laps on these types of bikes is in my opinion the purest form of the sport. Just...

Maybe I just haven’t noticed before on the other 32” bike pictures, but damn those tires look so close together.