I thought MTB was the new Golf for the white middle class male who wants to get outdoors.

You are thinking of road cycling mate.

Erm

I thought MTB was the new Golf for the white middle class male who wants to get outdoors.

Michelle Wie has just phoned and said that you’re a sexist as well as a racist 😉

A friend of a friend is a gay, black and female cyclist, and I saw her riding Brighton Big Dog XC race a few years ago. All boxes ticked! Non-white riders do seem rare, I have a couple in my wider riding circle but that’s close to 100 people. At least one gay rider in that group, there could be more but we’re Brighton so it’s not exactly a big deal. And some women.

I had a conversation about this with a British Indian friend some years back when I coaxed him on an XC ride and he said that sport and outdoor pursuits were never encouraged when he was growing up, and that doing well academically being considered far more important.

I once lived in the Caribbean, and had a child born there, and suspect that no one would have cared for one second if a white European person was featured in the hospital literature. Heck, it wouldn’t have dawned on us to care either.

It’s all very well to play the race blindness card, but we are not living in a post-racist world.  That’s why positive discrimination is necessary, to push the balance back to the middle.  And by middle, I don’t mean equal numbers of non-white and white, I mean everyone having the same available exposure and inspiration.

I had a conversation about this with a British Indian friend some years back when I coaxed him on an XC ride and he said that sport and outdoor pursuits were never encouraged when he was growing up, and that doing well academically being considered far more important.

I watched something on youtube just the other day but can’t find it again about some Indian youths who fell in love with kayaking after seing tourists on their local river. They started of with inner tubes and learned things themselves and spent a lot of time working for local outdoor holiday companies in exchange for training and use of equipment. Eventually they had enough experience and money to do the formal courses and they now work all over the world doing guiding and perfoming safety duties etc. Was quite inspiring to see where they came from and despite the odds being against them made it into a world that must have been totally alien to all their family and fellow villagers.