All

Sell the series to eso!

but did they love the broadcast

Hah. Olly Wilkins and Davy have talked pretty extensively about how urban DH should become its own sport and have a heavy marketing push to make it more popular. Some of the reasoning makes sense to me: 1) Ready-made live audience in population centers of race. 2) The "scale" makes more sense as people understand a bike dropping out of a two story window to the street below better than hucking off a stall wall without any point of reference. Speeds also look faster for same reason on camera. 3) Easier to televise and run infrastructure for television and filming...

Considering she could've taken the overall, that was a classy bit of losing from Vali as she crossed the line. Great to see Marine back up there. And then Benoit, so good to see him finally get that win.

hm, I would like to thank the UCI and GMBN/whoever is doing the broadcasts this year from transforming me from a die hard DH fan who watched everything, to someone who can't even be bothered to watch the highlights videos anymore. So a person who happily spent multiple hours both waiting for and watching both the male and female coverage, being engaged in who rode for what team and on what bikes / equipment (I even blogged for the biggest national site / magazine on the topic) to now going meh, just checking the results. if nothing else I have...

It's clear the new org is tying to create emotional connections between specific riders and the fans. Keeping the same group of riders on broadcasts and start lists in theory facilitates that. They are also trying to create drama - see their SM post about Bruni last week when he took the lead over Finn with the big headline "It was tense in the team". UCI fanning those flames....but also some real housewives type shit. Sadly that shit sells in this day and age. Aside from rider development and race experience issues with their new vision, the other thing they...

Mariana Salazar returns to racing in Les Gets! If you don't know, she was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, right after the race in Les Gets. She is finally able to return to racing after being a course sweeper at french national champs. Really this is the best news of the all week! Her fight went completely under the radar, I feel she deserves some recognition.

I have no inside knowledge, but Im going with Gwin wanting him on the team because when he grows his hair long he looks like Western Jesus and that is comforting. ;-)

@literally: I was trying to be nice. :D @thomas.gehrig: Intense bikes have been for a long time two monocoque halves welded together and that is much more than the welds on a normal bike. Misaligned I have heard of, but not of bad welds, maybe of frames that were much more prone to cracking than others. I believe Intense have been very intelligent about this, by creating the FRO mantra and positioning themselves like the Ferrari of MTB DH, suggesting that it's normal for racing bikes to be more fragile than others. That being said, I did not have issues...

this thread should be renamed 2024 Team Bummers

I think he just means that they look alike Not much to read into

Organizing any union is a tough thing to do. A union will almost always benefit all participants in the long run, but the short term incentives are not always there. Like you all said, the big money riders stand to benefit from a reduced field in the short term. However, every rider would benefit in the long-term from increased rider input in schedule changes, format changes, track selection and design, track safety, emergency/evacuation planning, rider pay, and everything else that riders complain about year after year. But it's tough getting people to trust each other and volunteer to give up...

i get it for sure, and it's a pipe dream to think big teams/brands/riders would avoid world cup. also no argument that crankworx tracks aren't terribly exciting, too. it would just be nice to stick it to the pocketbooks of those in charge by having everyone go race where they're welcomed. DH isn't road. it's not even XC. the audience and market is minuscule, it's generally scrappy and fringe by nature, and it will never be F1 with a series on netflix or tens of millions of people tuning in. i don't call this outlook pessimism, i call it reality...

IF THE TRACK IS ANNIHILATED THAT'S WHAT SPIKES AND TEAROFFS ARE FOR PROBLEM SOLVED

Can’t screw up a broadcast if you just cancel the race 😎

The silver lining is that with less riders racing world cups, more riders will shift to crank works races, which means more Elliot and Rob!

Ric is terrible too. He keeps rambling about Mullets - to a paying crowd of MTB enthusiasts. Imagine that. Thank you very much, we all know what mixed wheelsizes are. Just stick to commenting what's happening on screen. And while were at it: The camera work from VDS was absolutely terrible. 50% of the shots were just straight up bad. Weird angles, zoomed in way too much, shaky or showing more of the surroundings or the sky than the riders.