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That upper part is just the bikepark track, DH WC starts on the gravel road next to the chairlift station a bit down the mountain, if you check trailforks its clearly marked which is which.

Yeah if you go back to his early YouTube videos he tests a high pivot version with no OChain vs low pivot with Ochain. The OChain in -9 or -12 can make a big difference, if you pair it with low engagement hub it’s amplified this feel, but the slop at start of pedal stroke is something to get used to. For a downhill bike or park bike there’s not much of a downside using this device. The next level that I’m working on is grinding down my smallest cog as a “neutral” gear for descending. This is with no...

You get a like for full sized paper design. Oh, and some cool bikes! For the record. Here are my homemade bikes. https://dirtmountainbike.com/bike-reviews/homemade-bikes-big-bird

From the latest Making Up The Numbers podcast, one could easily read between the lines that Ryan Pinkerton is going to the new Mondraker team…

Most of the ‘bigger’ names who fall foul of a team insisting on a rubbish tyre sponsor have a clause in their contracts to state if there isn’t something ‘suitable’ from their sponsor, then it’s Team Sharpie all the way. Quite a few times, by some sort of miracle, they don’t have anything suitable, so they run anything but their sponsors tyres 😆

I rode in Champery a month ago, the day after it rained and I can't agree with you

you are mostly right, but there is more to it. the scale Morzine/Les gets events get local government endorsement (not necessary money) is huge.. and the WC does not paralyze the town.. hardly... everythiing continues, perhaps accomodation gets tricky, but capacity is huuuge (les gets, morzine, montriond, avoriaz, chatel).. so, no problem.. these towns get 2-3 events per summer that really disturb way more than MTB WC (harley davidson week, rally, TDF, spartan races) ; ). summary is they survive without them but the additional revenue from tourism into the town (not organizers) is what is looked for by the...

Champrey 2024 finish troll pic:

Masters worlds will be in Australia for 2024 and 2025, 2026/27 on Chile. 2024 Champery will host the european championship

As the Valais region in Switzerland is hosting the mega UCI worlds in 2025, there's a possibility that Champery will be the DH venue, which would be awesome.

It's more about just getting through the tunnel, setting up in bad weather, breaking down in bad weather, back through the UK and the tunnel, then pretty far east at 80klm an hour... Not complaining because we have it pretty easy being based in NE France but not all teams are as fortunate. I will say I'm happy to start the season on a tame track like Ft William instead of Lenzerheide...

Those are big gaps though. Especially if they are trying to gain even the casual fans. Almost 2 months off, 2 races then a month off for the final. Going to take a lot of hype for people to remember the series is still going.

There was, but if you listen to the Vital podcast about how 2023 was compared to 2022, the views from most of those riders were extremely varied. Even just Bernard to Bruni. It wouldn't surprise me if they tried seeing what the union would be aiming to achieve, realised they all had vastly different end games in mind, realised there was unlikely to be any way to reconcile those differences and decided not to bother. Any division within that union would have been picked up immediately by UCI/ESO/WBD and been easy to exploit to say why they weren't going to...

Team tin-foil? The world cup rider's association has always been only the top 30ish men and top women riders. It was never a union of hundreds of riders and was never planned to be such. It was, from the outset, about protecting the careers of the most elite riders. As you said, "saw from the outside", so what you saw and what is reality in this case are two different things.

Gypsy seems to be a word that gets a reaction on your side of the pond. It isn't the same over here. In the UK we have TV programmes with the word in the title and no one bats an eye.

As a fluent French speaker who lived in France for 14 years, I can offer a bit of context. The “gypsy” term is basically used interchangeably with “camper”, not intended as a slur but more of a funny way of describing anybody living out of a van for a while…it obviously gets lost in translation here.

In regards to amount of travel specifically - you will usually settle on less sag for shorter travel forks one way or another Oh one thing I feel important to point out - most of us mtb suspension guys are predominantly or entirely self taught so we are always still learning. While I disagree with some peoples opinions, a lot of them are very clever and overall do an excellent job. There are also likely a lot of gaps in the things I've learned, so I will always be open to learning new things too!

I was always pretty interested in set up from when I got proper in to mtb 20 years ago, and slowly learned more and more about the physics of mountain bikes, especially as I started to specialise in suspension more around 2009. But it was only about 6 years ago I came to realise that if I actually wanted to measure bikes and learn what was really going on I would need to buy my own dyno & data acquisition gear to do it.There was no one using a dyno or DAQ gear in NZ at that stage (a few...