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Not tech rumors, but soil tech history! The difference between Oregon, WA and BC is all about ice. Kilometer+ thick ice sheets created glacial terrain features and exposed more bedrock from Washington State north. Oregon didn't get the sweet, sweet ice sheet remodeling. The maximum extent of the Puget Lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet was Tenino, which is between Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon. In the Seattle area you have a lot of glacial till soils that the ice pushed around. Further north the ice scraped away soils and smoothed the bedrock, making terrain for amazing tech riding. This...

Shoot, I thought Oregon had the gnarliest of trails...

yes, they just use the living autopen, so smart he just aced 3 cognitive tests you‘d never administer 3x in a year on a „normal“ patient

This support is offered to anyone racing world cups, full service and even replacements if needed. Back in the days when 4x was still popular a privateer friend broke an internal of a fork, went to SRAM pits and one of the mechanics said that they are fully booked for today so they cant service that for him right now and then went into the truck and brough him back a brand new fork and a steerer cutter saying you are gonna have to help yourself

A south west rider testing a Belgian bike brand.

Maybe Greenland to Pivot. If he's healthy, he'll earn points.

I assumed production had been moved elsewhere some time ago because the website doesn't make any noise about them being made in the USA

How old is Frank the Welder? Dude has been making frames since before I can remember. I wonder if he can, or even if he wants to keep up with Frameworks growth?

Interesting that Vali is not mentioning Les Orres. As was mentioned by many including myself there are some big conflicts of interest between Vali's personal sponsors and the Schwalbe Les Orres teams current sponsors. So given Vali's 2025 personal salary (If YT actually paid up haha) is probably more than the Les Orres teams 2025 budget, I can imagine that the team will align more with Vali for 2026 and Commencal will pick up the budget lost. From these press releases it really looks like Vali is being highered by Commencal, but riding for the Ravanel team. Interesting times, but...

if anyone can do it IS so annoying, over and over. Every other ride. It really is terrible, my wife makes fun of it all the time. She asked once if it was a couple of guys making fun of the announcing by doing a bad voice over. Nope thats the show!! I will keep paying and watching because I love it but it's bad.

I’m really glad you called out the “if anyone can do it, he can” line, which gets mentioned at least 5 times every final. Pretty easy saying to understand yet there still ends up being a handful of “if anyone can” riders. 😂

DH is a hard sport to watch because it’s too fast and subtle for the average viewer to get it all visually and the background is so much more complicated and distracting than F1 or moto or ski races, which are on neat clear tracks and it’s generally obvious when something happens. Been said a million times but it’s the announcing and cameras that are ruining the show. And I’m not picking on Ric because Rob and Claudio weren’t much better. Eliot Jackson was great. Neko and Gwin can be great when they aren’t being constantly interrupted. I’m a longtime...

minnaar was the reason loris left the syndicate AFAIK, didn't like the old dogs mindgames.

I kinda feel like elites is a clean slate for the juniors, they'll be whatever banana they are based off of their results after the first few races. Max or Till would be the talk of the town if they were instantly beating their older team mates to podium spots. I'm thinking now though that it's actually someone like Nathan Pontvianne that is going to Norco, young, fast and french. I can't see commencal in general never mind the team letting either Alran go just yet.

On his recent Downtime interview, Wyn made the point that it’s pretty difficult to differentiate between race runs these days. Occasionally a rider or two will do something wild that no one else is doing. Or there may be a crash… but the reality is that all the runs kinds of look the same even to him, and even more to to random viewers who can’t spot the differences. The real “story” of any given race run is really just the split times Working off that assumption: it’s a pretty big leap to make watching 30 runs live compelling viewing...

It all comes down to policy. Removing the gold standard isn’t an issue in itself. An independent fed is a good thing. Simply there has been a total failure in leadership since the 90s on both sides of the aisle. When Clinton left office we were on a path to completely eliminate our national debt by the late 2000s. Since then we have continually increased our costs (some good, some bad) while cutting taxes across the board. But the shift (or realistically return) of the government supporting business over normal folk started much earlier. When Eisenhower was president taxes on...