Progressing The Sport: Josh Bender… (VIDEO)

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Every now and then, a rider’s name comes up in office conversation and we’ll jokingly ask if they ‘helped progress the sport’. While it’s a bit of fun for us, there is no denying that some riders – whether cross country racers, downhillers or freeride tricksters helped sculpt our sport in a revolutionary way akin to how Hendrix blew the guitar world apart.

In the first of a very occasional series, we present Josh Bender, the original freerider. And the closest we’ve ever had to our own Evel Knievel.

One of Bender’s bikes, with 12in of travel for huge cliff hucks
Padded bars for the inevitable head-nodder on landing (just look at the videos)
A long saddle to help moving around the bike – and so you never land your plums on the top tube. And TWO rear shocks!
Some readers won’t get this. Others will nod and go misty-eyed.

Josh Bender was the original ‘huck and hope’ rider and, just like Knievel, when things went right, it was amazing to watch. When things went wrong, they went quite wrong, but he usually got up and tried again. Someone in Russia has handily edited together a collection of Bender’s most memorable (for us, if not always for him) crashes together with some charming death metal, so turn the sound down and get stuck in.

And now for a similar video, but this time things go right more than they go wrong.

Bender, we salute you!

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Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 23 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

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