: Everything other than racing?

By: g | No Comments » |

There’s been a lot of ink spilt and keyboards worn out over the last few years on the phenomenon that is Freeriding. The marketing types will tell you it’s a new force here to save our sport from obscurity. Most people inside the sport will tell you it’s simply what mountain bikers have always done outside of racing, perhaps it’s just a logical progression. After all, these days it’s not too hard to see on-line what the different tribes of mountain bikers around the globe are up to. Take the global expansion of North Shore style trails, once only found in the backwoods of B.C., now found even in Australia’s great suburbia. We’ve got kids learning to build and ride crazy stunts. Is this such a bad thing?

What about the kids in the concrete jungles of the inner city? Is the joy of urban riding any different around the globe? So why isn’t everyone getting in on it? More importantly, is what the kids of the inner city doing any different from the rest of us? They get on a bike either in search of fresh challenges or to re-visit old, more familiar ones. Either way the freedom to choose how and where to ride is entirely up to them…Sound familiar?

I remember vividly my first mountain bike. I couldn’t wait to get it home. I’d been riding an old road bike after progressing from riding BMXes as a young tacker. There was only so far a young bloke could ride a BMX in my neighbourhood. I yearned for a little more freedom than it’s single speed drive train would allow, yet progressing to a road bike only partially quelled my young desire for true freedom. After that first ride on the local trails in the Adelaide Hills in the mid to late 80’s I knew I’d cracked it. It was one of those moments in life where you “just know” and as long as you can keep this feeling of freedom and exhilaration forever, you’ll be doing just fine. I now had a bike that could survive my riding, on any terrain I chose to ride, and get me there and back in time for dinner. A road bike couldn’t offer me the ability to ride into the hills and discover the kind of riding I could on a mountain bike, not without destroying it anyway. My BMX was a gang of fun, but getting it anywhere (without someone with a car) was a full day issue.

Flash forward in time 20 or so years and look at what years of racing development has given us. Mountain bikes have become stronger, lighter and better equipped to handle pretty much any terrain within reason. Today’s bike has given us all the ability to ride things considered too insane just a few short years ago. Want proof? Check out some of the photos in old magazines from the early 90’s. If you could take an average mountain bike back in time 10 years, can imagine the looks you’d get on the trail? That’s not taking into account what we actually have available today either. Bikes have improved beyond our wildest imagination. So with that in mind is that to say we’re having more fun now than we did back then?

Bikes now are the pinnacle of an evolutionary process began by those early pioneering frame builders. They are the quintessential means of human powered transport for any terrain. Is it logical for us then to create limiting visions on where and what we ride? If you live around the corner from a skate park or BMX track, why can’t you check it out on your bike? This example is over simplified in the extreme and it’s important to remember that not all mountain bikes will take the rigours of a skate park. But hey, I’m not suggesting for one minute that you’ve got to go clearing fun boxes either. This gets me back to Freeriding, what’s to stop us as Mountain bikers from riding where we want and when we want (apart from the laws of the land and common courtesy). You own a Mountain bike and love to ride it just because, isn’t that what it’s all about? Isn’t that the same reason you wanted a bike as a youngster? Freedom! Freeriding should be about all the things we can do on a bike that is neither racing nor using a bike solely as a means to an end. Do we want our sport to be easily packaged and presented to a mass audience? Or something that we, as mountain bikers, continue to evolve and progress? We shouldn’t dictate what our sport is and is not, because it’s quite possible that while we are busy arguing what it isn’t, the next generation will be interrupting us by doing it. We shouldn’t be in a hurry to limit the growth potential of what mountain biking can be. It is, after all, only a relatively new sport, not yet bogged down with tradition that comes without progress. In a way we are very much still in the technological golden age of mountain biking. Just how much longer can bikes realistically keep improving as they have in the last 10 odd years? More importantly why do we ride?

Text: The Colonel, image: Tim Grainger

The Colonel started riding anything with two wheels and pedals at a young age, it wasn’t too long before he came down with MTBitis. Apart from a brief break from riding in the early 90′s due to starting a new carer and settling down in Sydney’s greater north west, it’s been a life of two wheeled fat tyre shenanigans with a little bit of Downhill Racing on the club, state and national level thrown in for good measure. Working as an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer has for the most part financed his single minded obsession with riding and sicking up bikes with the one purpose, whacking a huge cheesy grin on his dial and mainlining endorphins. For the Colonel, riding is much more than a sport or hobby, it’s a lifestyle chock full with all of what life should be all about.

 

Tags:casual,freeride,race,ride


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