Two steps forward, one step off the cliff
Chipps wonders if ‘too much’ will always be just enough, or if too much is actually too little?
It seems to be human nature to push things a little too far before settling back into a more comfortable place. Too much cake, too much booze, too much exercise, too much work… You won’t know the boundaries if you’ve not been there, right?
We do the same with bikes and gear if we get the chance. Who’s gone out and bought a jump bike before they could do any jumps? Or convinced themselves that only a cross-country race bike will allow them to race. Surely buying the correct bike will bestow magical talents and spare the owner from that long apprenticeship of skill progression?
On the professional circuit, we used to see riders like Bender blind-hucking themselves off cliffs with little hope of landing tricks without injury. The recent slew of horrible Red Bull Rampage injuries shows that there will always be riders willing (or pressured, whether by themselves, their sponsors or their need for the cash) to push the limits of what’s currently thought possible to do on a bike. That’s a debate for another place, but I hope that the need for bigger and bigger tricks will be tempered by more realistic and rider-safety-friendly goals. No one wants to see riders landing a cliff-drop without a bike under them.
With downhill and slopestyle riding, fork and bike travel got longer and longer, until we had Karpiel Armageddons and foot-long Marzocchi Monster T forks – basically a motorbike fork, with the subtlety and weight of one too. On the cross-country scene, we had racers running three of the six bolts that kept their brake discs attached to their forks. Road bar tape instead of grips, and stingy amounts of tyre sealant to further save those grams.
These boundaries need to be hit; otherwise, we won’t know where they exist, and what tends to happen is that technology, or riding skills and safety features, catch up to where a race bike is now lighter and a load more durable than the one that had holes drilled in it and half the bolts missing. Fork and bike travel has got a little shorter overall, but forks are now lighter and better modulated, compared to the simple circuits that relied on travel over control. Overall, bike weights have reduced a little bit at a time through clever design and better use of materials, without the need for a drill or leaving a box of ‘leftover’ spare bolts.
However, landing from the top of a cliff without your bike is always going to hurt, even if you’re the correct way up, and there aren’t many ways to engineer around that. We’re already seeing a generation of riders coming through for whom a backflip and a 360 (or both at once) are viewed as the minimum requirement for modern riding and who’ve been able to hone those skills in foam pits and on padded ramps, but short of deep-pile carpeting the mountains of the world, those skills still come with very little wiggle room for error.
When it comes down to it, all of the bike tech in the world isn’t going to change the squishy, surprisingly heavy, human who’s making the bike go uphill, or downhill, or off-cliff. Unless we can pack another million years of evolution in somehow – and bio-engineer stronger skeletons and abrasion-resistant skin, we’re just going to have to work out how to work with what we’ve been blessed with.
