In the first issue of Singletrack Magazine, Mark and Chipps both wrote editorials. After 25 years, we figure that this is a good thing to revisit.
(We did re-use their original photos though. Pixels an’ all!)
Welcome to issue 166 of Singletrack World Magazine. It marks, and celebrates, a full 25 years of the magazine since its launch (with the website) on April Fools’ Day, 2001.
This also marks my final issue as Editor here. I figured that a quarter of a century doing the same job probably qualifies as a ‘good shift’ and I appreciate that if I want to do something else with my life, there’s probably never a better time than now. (Not that I’m remotely qualified to do anything these days…)
It’s not all bad, though. I leave the magazine in great hands: Benji Haworth will be stepping up to the role of Editor of the magazine, and my long-time friend and business partner Mark will continue to steer the business side of the magazine. Both of them will be helped by our small army of staff and freelancers, and I look forward to seeing what they make of the magazine, website and whole Singletrack World, er, world, free of my influence.
I’d would be cliché for me to say that you readers and us writers (and photographers and designers) have grown up together over the last couple and a half decades, but the reality is that many of us have grown up and even old together. We’ve followed a sport we all love dearly, as it went from its 1990s ‘next skateboarding’ new-kid phase, through the years of big sponsors and big events, found Red Bull, found mainstream love and then enjoyed the weird peaks and troughs of the Covid years. Even after all that turmoil, there are still bikes to ride and trails to be ridden. The ear-to-ear grin of a great singletrack ridden well will never lose its appeal.
Throughout all of this, Singletrack World Magazine has endured. We’ve outlived nearly all of our big-business-backed rivals, and some heartfelt self-financed mags too. I’d like to think that a large reason why we have survived so long is that we simply didn’t want to let our subscribers down, we worked frugally, and we didn’t have an idea of what else we might do. Singletrack has literally been the life’s work of several folks here, and I’m happy to hand the magazine over to lifelong riders who’ll keep the spirit alive.
The sport as we know it is barely recognisable from the early 2000s when the magazine started. Bikes are so much better to ride, more reliable, safer and fun than they were back then. Our access to the countryside, fortunately, hasn’t diminished, and we’ve even seen new trail centres open up in recent years.
Every time we thought that the state-of-the-art mountain bike couldn’t be improved, we were proved wrong. Every time we thought we’d ridden the perfect trail, we were shown another. And every time we thought we’d seen the fittest, fastest riders we’d ever see, a new generation has come along and whupped the old guard into submission.
Mountain biking is an organic thing that will always grow and evolve. Singletrack World has always, and will always, evolve with the sport that we love and the pastime that will always be, deep down, who we all are and not just what we do for fun.
See you on the trails. It’s been a blast. – Chipps
25 years ago there were no smartphones.
The ‘practical’ internet itself was just a few years old. Print was still the principal medium for content distribution. But we didn’t care about those norms back then. We decided that a digital magazine was the future. Plus, print was messy, permanent and REALLY expensive and we had no money.
Chipps had bought a half-decent digital camera by the time we got to issue two. Before that, the ‘company’ owned an Olympus digital camera that could take snaps at a whopping 1.2Mb in size. I think that was 1220 pixels wide [a single magazine page is 2480 pixels wide – Ed]. Pretty much all of those first few issues were shot on slide film and then scanned for production. Our office didn’t happen until issue three and that came with a dialup internet modem and then ISDN. Download speeds were less than 100kb. That’s ‘Kb’ NOT ‘Mb’
When the mag was designed, it was burned onto multiple CD-ROMS which, on several occasions, I drove the 400-mile round trip to our printer in Lincolnshire.
Today, the entire production chain that once required a small van full of kit and a minor logistics plan fits in a pocket. Photos are instant, sharp, and effectively free. Video is expected, not exotic. Layout can be done on a laptop in a café, backed up automatically, shared in seconds, commented on by three people at once, and exported in whatever format the internet has decided it wants this week. If I had to do that Lincolnshire run now, I’d probably assume I’d forgotten my phone charger, not the entire magazine.
The audience has changed, too. Back then, you found your people by putting something on a website and hoping they stumbled across it. Now, your people are being shouted at by a thousand competing tabs, apps, notifications, and algorithmic nudges. Attention is the scarce resource. Everyone can publish. Everyone can film, edit, grade, caption, and upload before you’ve finished making a cup of tea. A.I. is the next frontier, we are constantly being told, and all content creation must adapt to it. If the tech can now write itself then surely this means we are obsolete?
But we aren’t. If anything, the opposite has happened: the easier it’s become to make content, the more valuable it is to make something worth anyone’s time.
Because the fundamentals haven’t moved. Not really.
A good story still does what it always did. It takes you somewhere. It makes you feel like you were there. It gives shape to a ride, a trip, a crash, a triumph, a terrible idea that somehow became a great day out. It makes you laugh at the bits that were grim at the time. It turns “I went riding” into “you won’t believe what happened when…”
And in mountain biking; a sport largely made of mud, weather, mechanicals and questionable decisions: that’s the currency. Not megapixels. Not bandwidth. Not whether it’s delivered on paper, pixels, or beamed directly into your eyeballs by whatever comes next.
We’ve always been a magazine that’s tried to sound like the people who read it: experienced riders, slightly opinionated, not massively impressed by hype, and very impressed by a good day on a bike. The tech has changed the workflow beyond recognition, but it hasn’t changed that relationship. If anything, it’s made it more important. Trust is harder to earn when everyone’s yelling. Voice matters more when everything else is templated.
The cameras, the connections, the costs, the process – all unrecognisable. But the reason we’re still here is the same as it was when we were burning CDs and praying the upload wouldn’t fail at 99%: stories are still the cornerstone of what we do.
And as long as riding bikes keeps giving us new ones, we’ll keep telling them.
Bad decisions make great stories – as it says on our merch. – Mark
