Thanks so much for putting this up!

I want to hug this entire event.

Max was robbed

DH racing is better than ever- and statistically US downhill racers are better than ever, there are just less of them. DH is just harder than it has ever been, and it costs twice as much as it did 15-20 years ago, when day-job wages were essentially the same as they are now, but far, far more young people had decent jobs, way less college debt and affordable health insurance. MTB racing was on cable and satellite TV, so it was much easier to sell to outside sponsors too.

Now the top-level of racing being televised and controlled by a primary monetary sponsor for the athletes(instead of exposure on Satellite and Cable like we once had) audited numbers about viewership aren't shared freely and that creates a pretty significant barrier to bringing in non-endemic sponsorship that can support larger teams or better domestic production values.
Our "friends" at Redbull are clearly doing amazing things for the sport, but they also are holding many of the most important cards in the sponsorship deck.
As a corollary to that statement:
It's been 15 years since there was a USA governing body that was concerned with high level domestic mountain biking in this country and it's been 20 years since the governing body was responsible for running an actual national series with prize purses and a consistent event staff and rulebook.

That governing body was deliberately disassembled by people at USAC who saw NORBA as a threat.
These days I feel like USAC doesn't even have the tools to relate to the "core" mtb market- and they get to claim "record numbers" of Junior XC starts(if you ignore that junior race numbers were once twice as large under NORBA) on the back of NICA and other regional scholastic xc racing programs... programs that hyper-professionalize little kids and brainwash them into begging for carbon hardtails...
The "Enduro Light" that ESC is promoting is one of the more effective ways I've seen to bring kids into the fun kind of MTB racing.
The problem is clearly much more complex than can be addressed in the comments section on Vital, obviously but...

Why?
Because nobody is trying to promote one!

World Cup races don't just happen- there needs to be a well funded and dedicated local organizing committee and significant six-figure capital investment to make a World Cup work.

There are people and organisations in the Windham region who are willing to lay down significant sums of personal cash with little or no financial return because they love bike racing and want to promote their region to the world.

I hear ya about CX. I'm spawn of the NCC/Cycle-Smart brigade that lead the charge. I moved to the valley for college in '99 to be around people like Adam+JD and badasses like Mono.
I was on ye-olde NCC board for a while.

I've tried to do as much as I can alone to make more connections between athletes, the promoters and media but unfortunately we have a lost generation of MTB racers. When things fell apart circa 2002 the entire mtb scene imploded and hundreds of passionate people that at one time could have been relied upon for grassroots organizing went away.
I just don't have enough time to make all of the people who need to communicate communicate and reconnect lots of people who need to know each other again, but it needs to happen.

i am not of the opinion that och, wiesel, johnson et. al. are going anywhere anytime soon... so i dont see there being any vacuum at all... however, i do see that there is a place for passionate people to guide the sport and provide the support needed to make a healthy and fun grass roots racing scene a reality.

CYCLOCROSS, study it, learn what the fans did to create their own scene (and even within USAC!)...

once we have a vision, we can build, just as cross has.. in the early and mid nineties there were few internationally competitive US cross racers, no good races, no national series, no support... and now thanks to THE PEOPLE, there is a great scene with new riders enjoying the sport every weekend and the USA is scoring top tens in WC, all the best North Americans are top 20 riders in World Cup, and it looks like Jeremy Powers could make a worlds podium in 2013 ON HOME SOIL!!! to follow up John Page's excellent silver a few years back... it just depends on us...

important to make the distinction between riding and racing though... i just like racing, so i get excited about it...

Griz(and other passionate loudmouths)-
If you want to keep getting stoked on revolution, do, because this is one of those formative moments where we can all make a difference. Holla at yer boys, get 'em on board, tell the media, roll, roll, roll, roll.

Because it's like this- there is going to be a HUGE power vacuum when USAC cleans house. Very big-
A voluntary free and open riders organisation that can speak for off-road athletes and organizers can and will be able to make a big difference over the next couple of years.
It's really time for as many people as possible to get over their egos, promoters to get over their petty differences and sponsors to come together to create even a small membership funded non-profit .org that can help speak for our interests by accumulating the capital necessary to speak loudly.
I'm hoping that this story will make people realize how small the bike racing biz is, it just seems impenetrable because of the concentration of power.
When we work to disassemble that power structure we will get closer to a point where a racing organisation can be self-governed by atheltes, sponsors and promoters, not bureaucrats serving the interests of a few very rich, very powerful people.

When the media finishes unraveling the whole Armstrong ball of yarn it's final terminus will be at USAC.
Expect to hear about USAC in the main-stream media in about 4 weeks, lots of people are going to be outraged.

The money behind that place is filthy, and the dude who ultimately holds the strings to the purse there is the guy who co-owned the postal service team and is credited in a sworn affidavits as the genus behind the USPS program as well as deliberately destroying the NCS series and then NORBA.
There are people in the racing world and industry that hate USAC as much as the rest of us, but have always been afraid of Lance

There really seems to be a bit of a detente and ex USAC and NORBA board members who work in the bike industry or are still active athletes have some pretty heavy stories since they were in USCF/USAC board meetings while the same damn guy first cut funding to the NCS series and then succeeded in eliminating NORBA entirely explicitly because he wanted to maximize his own personal investment in the Postal team. If somehone can figure out how to bring the death of NORBA up in a trial or hearing situation there are dozens of people, who were there that would be forced to help compile a dossier of just how, it turns out, USAC deliberately assassinated mountainbiking just so they could spend more money on well, bad stuff.
That's straight shooting too...

Lemond is a freaking great guy.