This definitely makes Dual Slalom a lot cooler.

We had a proper day on track today. Can’t wait for Snowshoe 2021.
America loaded up their vans en masse yesterday morning and made the trip.
The noise in the key spectator zones was literally disorienting.

Love me some of that Dizzle Sizzle!

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...