[Closed] Difference between professional roadies and MTBers

I know which are having the most fun and it ain't the roadies...

Could be any number of factors: general education; media training; the riders trying to empathise with/ sound like their audience/fans; peer pressure.

☕🍰

I suspect there's a lot of media-driven image involved here.  There's no good  reason for anything other than a wide range of educational standards/ IQ in both aspects of the sport.

Perhaps you need to have the IQ of a small stone to do the mentalist stuff the Pro MTB riders do? It's bloody terrifying.

It's all about attitude to risk.

Anyone who's prepared to throw themselves down a mountain at extreme speed risking life changing injuries or death is also unlikely to give a rat's ass about perhaps being perceived as less than  polished in a subsequent media interview.

Odd thing to notice.

What about footballers and rugby players? Ever noticed a difference there?

Or golfers and boxers?

Different sports attract different types shocker.

The whole extreme sport field has it’s own vernacular and I suppose to the uninitiated it sounds dumbed down but then again it’s not supposed to appeal to the masses. If you listen to a lot of the German road pros they are as thick as pig shite. It’s quite the stereotype here that stupid people become road pros.

Probably a bit of media training on both sides - tuned to target audience.

Gravity MTB disciplines and their audience resonate more like action/extreme sports, hence the crossover into MX etc etc, whereas road cycling is a bit more like track & field, and has a different audience.

yeah but.....

not all roadies are dull and media trained... (well probably is but has fun with it)

Wow, this is one of the stupidest posts I've seen on here for a while.

Ever heard the phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"?

I'm not sure DH only attracts the thickos, Manon Carpenter is back in Uni now she's 'retired' from World Cups and I'm sure there are others, there was a pretty decent Student DH scene a few years ago.

I think a lot of it comes down to the audience and how the sport is 'sold'. MTBing is still largely only watched by other mountain bikers, to earn a living from it you don't have to be the best, just popular (you still need to be very good), 'we' like the mavericks, the loons and the adventure seekers, the 'RedBull effect' doesn't help - it's a brand sold on Extreme Sport nutters.

I don't really follow Road Riding, but when I've seen bits of 'Le Tour' on TV the riders seem almost joyless, but there's so much more money involved because it's more of a mainstream sport that you end up with the robotic PR machines, just like F1 - it's better to say almost nothing interesting than risk upsetting part of your audience.

Ironically (because they're are the driving force behind Hardline)  The Atherton's are probably the most robotic DHers you'll see, they're pushing for the mainstream and they're probably the most media savvy team, they were doing the whole funny web-series thing long before anyone else, back when Gee and Rach had personalities.

It's worth watching the World Cup series, a good race is a great way to spend a few hours in front of the box and it's a bit more 'normal' than Hardline - Hardline is a bit like Rampage, an end of the season blow-out for riders who don't mind risking a lot for a little, it's not really representative of the DH race circuit.

Shall I throw in the hand grenade of class divide when comparing such sports as football and rugby..... Go on then!

Wow, this is one of the stupidest posts I’ve seen on here for a while.

Precisely why?

Everyone else who answered before you managed to see what I was asking/saying and responded accordingly. If there is nothing to it, then say so and say why.

EDIT: Your stealth edit doesn't really make your first comment much clearer.

rugby union or league

Roadies have had the last four hours on the bike to contemplate what they are going to say.

MTBers are still so full of adrenaline after their run.

"I just kept on turning the pedals. It was a hard climb"

Compare that to the average downhill race or free ride event.

Try and succinctly sum up a run of your last trail where you finished at the bottom buzzing with adrenaline without using any clichés or specific MTB jargon.

Surely it’s just down to there being massively more money involved in road cycling, which means the teams/sponsors push for more professionalism in interviews, etc? You can see it when a footballer (for example) ends up repeating the same word/phrase about 20 times in an interview 🙂

 I respect and appreciate people in ALL walks of life.... the Red Bull guys mostly sounded like half-baked surfer dudes

I'm guessing you don't really appreciate surfer dudes very much, which is ok, I'm not a big fan myself, but you might be better to just admit that right from the start.

I suspect a large part of it is playing to the audience and the athlete's giving the interview that's expected of them.

<div>perchypanther
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It’s all about attitude to risk.

Anyone who’s prepared to throw themselves down a mountain at extreme speed risking life changing injuries or death is also unlikely to give a rat’s ass about perhaps being perceived as less than  polished in a subsequent media interview.

Which ones are we talking about here? The ones doing it off road or the ones sustaining 100kmh in a group whilst dressed in lycra?

Saxon Rider

I have never watched any downhilly-type stuff before.

There's probably also an element of personality type in there too I reckon. Thinking of the many riders I know across multiple cycling disciplines, there's definitely a pattern. The pure MTB riders are louder, more energetic and excitable, and the pure roadies (and actually the pure XC MTB types too) much more "dry" and reserved in their manner, almost to the point of "awkward". Obviously this is far from scientific but based on a decent number and over many years.

See Cav's early interviews for lack of polish 🙈

Can we add Cricketers into the thicko mix? Andrew Flintoff is a Flat Earther.

<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12px; background-color: #eeeeee;"> the professional road world seems to top the downhill world by a significant margin.</span>

The roadies are probably on nootropics.

That or as others have pointed out its aimed at the audience. Given how boring the few roadie interviews I have seen are (hence why its a limited number) it wouldnt really work as a follow up to someone doing some serious stunts.

I’m guessing you don’t really appreciate surfer dudes very much, which is ok, I’m not a big fan myself, but you might be better to just admit that right from the start.

I must admit I laughed at the first line of the OP - it was exactly like an "I'm not racist but.." intro 😆

Precisely why?

Everyone else who answered before you managed to see what I was asking/saying and responded accordingly. If there is nothing to it, then say so and say why.

EDIT: Your stealth edit doesn’t really make your first comment much clearer.

Sorry stupidest was a lazy choice of words.

Should have said ignorant, patronising, demeaning and cringeworthy.

If you compare the immediate post race interviews with the likes of Cav, Greipel, Kittel, etc. i.e. the sprinters then they are in the same hyped up state as DH riders after their run and their interviews are less "measured". An hour or so later and many of the interviews are more "on message"

MTBers are still so full of adrenaline after their run.

It'll be this, I think you might be confusing that and people enjoying themselves with being stupid!

It works both ways, if I went by the majority of interviews I've seen of roadies it would give me the impression they are all dull lifeless individuals and road riding is boring as hell. That is actually my opinion of it but I know somewhere there will be some roadies with an outgoing personality that get the same buzz out of it that a DH rider has at the end of a run.

Ratboy can't be understood by the majority of English speakers, doesn't even race properly any more and still sells more Santa Cruzs than Minnaar.
Road cycling is nothing like off road cycling.

Simple answer ...

Hardline riders need a screw loose to huck themselves off massive cliffs.

OP raises a mildly interesting point about different interviewee styles in different sports and gets a range of mildly interesting replies.

cant see how it warrants this

Should have said ignorant, patronising, demeaning and cringeworthy

Got to love Danny!

Maybe it's just the choice of drugs...

You succeeded in it being judgemental.

Different sports/different people.  I don't see that a high IQ would help in either so it's a bit irrelevant.

Greg and Gwin are pretty much always clued up at interviews. Danny's accent does him no favours but his answers are always thought through.

Some people  are just better in front of a mike than others I guess

There’s probably also an element of personality type in there too I reckon. Thinking of the many riders I know across multiple cycling disciplines, there’s definitely a pattern. The pure MTB riders are louder, more energetic and excitable, and the pure roadies (and actually the pure XC MTB types too) much more “dry” and reserved in their manner, almost to the point of “awkward”. Obviously this is far from scientific but based on a decent number and over many years.

I'm not convinced.

On the one hand there are plenty of top DH'ers that fall into the cold/dull/calculating/autistic* end of the spectrum.

An on the other there are some ferociously vocal roadies (Wiggins and Cav throwing tantrums in press conferences, Saggan, and Armstrong ust from recent history).

If you watch Bryceland and compare him to Froome, then you'd reach your conclusion, but that's just extrapolation form a very small dataset.

*speaking as someone who's definitely somewhere on the spectrum

It’s all about attitude to risk.

Ahahaha, that's awesome 😂

"The whole extreme sport field has it’s own vernacular and I suppose to the uninitiated it sounds dumbed down but then again it’s not supposed to appeal to the masses."

Hence the involvement of niche non-entities like Red Bull and Oxbow.

The OP has subconsciously fallen for all the stereotypes.

Is all culture and lifestyle invariably linked to a fair element of marketing.

You get intelligent people in all disciplines. However to get good in any sport you have to start young, so you very quickly adopt the culture of that sport.

So using stupid words such as 'stoked' becomes the norm, wearing trousers around your ankles becomes the norm, having long hair and not washing it becomes the norm.

Completely different sports, with different backgrounds, viewers, scenes, everything.  I'd have been more surprised if they were the same.

XC MTBers talk more like roadies, whereas DHers talk just like all the other other 'extreme' sportspeople.  That's why we have extreme sports and normal sports.

Vive les differences.

Well, in spite of chakaping's somewhat negative appraisal of my OP, I have done a few searches for adrenaline and IQ, and other related topics, and it seems I am not alone in asking such an "ignorant, patronising, demeaning and cringeworthy" question.

It seems that scientists, social scientists, and journalists (of course), have all been asking questions and, on the basis of asking them in the first place, are part of the ignorant, patronising, demeaning, and cringeworthy club.

In each instance, there is a 'type' identified as being 'adrenaline' driven or 'risk' driven, and in each instance a corresponding question about personality features and intelligence levels and types. It's a wonder any psychological/sociological/anthropological work ever gets done, considering how easy it is to call out someone for asking initial questions based on observations.

What [I]would be[/I] ignorant, etc., is if the person asking persisted in his/her assumptions after encountering the answers.

Bizarrely, in spite of what a few of you seems to have assumed, I have really appreciated being offered some good answers to my question, and have reconsidered my initial observations.

Oh, and this

Vive les differences

I really did mean what I said in the OP.

Danny Hart interviewer      Since Steve Peat only British rider to win 3 back to back .... hhmm??

If intelligence was related to the way you speak Birmingham would be a mess......hang on 🧐

Surely the place to ask would be a forum full of ....oh wait a minute

I see where you're coming from but the problem might be in how you phrased the question - your OP made it seem like it was all about how they spoke, ie sounding like a surfer dude = stupid, therefore downhillers are not as clever as roadies who are more articulate. You also mentioned you'd never really watched downhill before so it seems a little bit of an uninformed conclusion

As other posters have said, there's a distinct culture that goes along with certain sports that informs how many in that sport talk - it's possible that if some roadies went back in time and became downhillers instead they'd talk like surfer dudes. Certainly when I worked a couple of seasons in the alps I started using terms like 'stoked and 'gnarly'.

I do think there might be something to the point you make about IQ vs risk taking behaviour, but that didnt really come across in your OP.

Audience and media training... as said above watch interviews with Gwin or Minnar.  Also compare these two videos both involving Brent Tippie....

The first one is Tippie in sensible mode... his inside the tape videos are very informative...

<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> https://www.pinkbike.com/news/inside-the-tape-raw-garbanzo-dh-crankworx-whistler-2017.html</span>

The second involves Tippie on Heckers rock and is not safe for work etc.... and probably aimed at a slightly different audience.

<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> https://www.pinkbike.com/news/Just-The-Tip-Hecklers-Rock.html</span>

You don’t seem to have too many radsick types in some of the high adrenaline (I assume) winter sports, luge, bobsleigh etc. Particularly the ski jumpers, mainly because they are all physics PhDs...

Could it it be that these sports (summer sports as well) have less room for expression, hence attract less or more expressive people. Snowboard half pipe vs ski jumper, DHer vs TTist

Plenty of intelligent pro DHers about should you care to seek them out. However...

I have never watched any downhilly-type stuff before.

...that's likely your problem.

Not getting the risk taking equals lower intelligence thing. A lot of big wave riders seem to be very intelligent individuals, same with free climbers.

I thought the main difference was those horrible prottrudpr veins in roadies legs, a sure sign that they'll be dead at 55 of a heart attack definitely not linked to years of performance enhancing drugs   

how times have changed. Nicknamed Le Prof. not only for his glasses but because he passed le bac

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<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12px;">Not getting the risk taking equals lower intelligence thing. A lot of big wave riders seem to be very intelligent individuals, same with free climbers.</span>

Its very difficult to actually calculate risk if you are thick, those who are thick either give up early or die loudly.

TBH, i found on the road scene, you get a lot of time, both training and recovering, so you either think, or switch off.

They look like Yates' legs, but not in BMC shorts.  Yates has had to stop cycling due to his varicose veins.

As someone has said, different sports take different mind sets, and all have their own culture. There is very different training regimes in different parts of the cycling disciplines.

Do what you are good at, sports. work etc.

Look at the social class of the majority of the kids coming through the BC development squads ... there was an article last year, or maybe the year before, that suggested the majority were from middle to higher middle class families ...

@funkmasterp - by"free climbers" do you mean the incorrect usage of solo climbers? Most climbing done around the world is "free" there's only a few areas where aid climbing prevails.

I did a lot of soloing: on rock, snow/ice and in the Alps. Never done to impress and I was always well within my comfort zone even if the climbs were ostensibly "hard".

I think the risk of extreme sport is incorrect. It would be high risk if you rode like this but their skill level is different. Roadies have high risk too but it's less visually spectacular. Risk taking tends to involve a lot of visualisation and thinking ime, rather than blind hope, although that also comes into it sometimes but more the exception.

<span style="color: #444444; font-size: 12px; background-color: #eeeeee;">Look at the social class of the majority of the kids coming through the BC development squads …</span>

Because arseholes over the last 20 years have persuaded the general population that it's not worth even turning up unless you can drop 5 grand on carbon, di2 and deep section rims.

Well done.

(and there are plenty of thick rich people about. Just because you talk with a plummy accent doesn't mean you are particularly smart.)

Just because you talk with a plummy accent doesn’t mean you are particularly smart.)

I don't think they were suggesting that anposh accent means you are not thick but that they may have learnt skills through their life that make them appear to come across in a more elequent manor to a substantial section of the audience. Kind of like having basic media training built from a younger age.

I agree with you on the obsession with equipment front, however I will say racing bikes us always expensive, road MTB whatever, even if the bike is very mid range the travel and spares add up to significant money.

Pretty sure those legs are George Hincapie. He was known for his veinage.

OP comparing apples with oranges, a better comparison would be pro XC MTBer with roadies, but no one watches XC, so harder to judge... Hardline and road cycling are about as similar to each other as rugby and golf.

If you are looking for correlations to try and turn into causation: there’s an article on the front page of this site about crashes and concussion risk; or you could ask if the high caffeine in the associated energy drinks has an effect on interview style!

More likely this is actually the style of interview that each sponsor wants, because their target demographic responds well to it!

Look at the social class of the majority of the kids coming through the BC development squads … there was an article last year, or maybe the year before, that suggested the majority were from middle to higher middle class families …

that is hardly surprising, to compete sensibly you need a half decent bike, kids keep growing, Probably compete in at least two disciplines (at teenage years add in pit bikes or spare wheels etc too), perhaps have rollers, need shuttled all over the country to events and training sessions etc. Even event entries and race licenses are not trivial to a family struggling to make ends meet. Cycling is accessible to people with not much cash, but serious squad type cycling is not so accessible - I suspect it is the same with most sports.   Now of course it depends what you mean by middle class, and I suspect quite a few of the people I’ve met at these sort of things would take offence at that - but I’d bet almost all are in employment/self employed (and not on minimum wage) and own (mortgage) their own home.  Even just the flexibility needed to get people too /from some events / session means those with less flexible employers will find it hard to manage logistics.  BUT I doubt it is any different for the really serious Downhill families either?

I think part of the challenge is the questions being asked. Every single DH run / road race you do and at the bottom there's some journo asking essentially the same 6 questions in varying ways.

How did you feel today?
Tell us about [insert technical feature]
How did you prepare for this event?
What do you think of the course?
How was your competition today?

There's really only so many ways even the most intelligent and articulate sportsperson can answer the same questions day in day out, especially a few minutes after a hair-raising sprint finish or a tough mountain climb (for road racing).

F1 does the same, it comes down to a boring thing about how great the team were, how the tyres held up, a note to say that they loved the circuit, the crowds were amazing blah blah and then something about how close it was with [nearest competitor].

Really complicated subject.

Opportunity is key.

We had some brilliant cricketers in our school, but no school or locals teams to develop their talents. Same with rugby.

I played both in the cubs and scouts and later with work, but North Manchester schools played football to the exclusion of almost everything else. Nobby Stiles was taught to play by nuns at St Patrick's in Collyhurst - an academy of genius disguised as a school and convent.

It goes deep.

Five miles up the road in Oldham it was rugby league - every child was steeped in it and was taught the game in school.

Asian kids everywhere seemed to play cricket as well as football.

I don't think I've met many people up  here who play rugby union unless they came from a school that focused on the sport.

I live in Burnley now, a town which is fanatical about football and has the highest percentage of fans and local support in relation to population in the UK. Everyone wears  some item of branded clothing, seemingly regardless of gender or class.

Interesting thread.

Isn't it just that they just use different types of drugs?

And trousers.

Wider trousers, wider minds.

And don't forget money. Before Jimmy Hill stuck his chin in, most footballers were payed the same as the fans they shared the bus to the ground with.

Precisely why?

I have never watched any downhilly-type stuff before.

Well based on a sample of 1 you have postulated ...

Now, I am aware that you get the bright and the dim in all walks of life, but on balance – in terms of the IQ stakes – the professional road world seems to top the downhill world by a significant margin.

Honestly, am I imagining it? Or is there a correspondence between more thrill-oriented sports and lower levels of education and/or intelligence?

You seem to be implying (through ignorance as opposed to malice) that getting a degree or higher degrees in in Engineering (loads of examples .e. Neil D or Craig M) or Geology (Manon) for example is illustrative of low intelligence.

The difference (from someone did both) tends to be a more down to earth attitide ... I know one female Geologist for example who is averse to mud and grease but most of my female geology and engineering friends and colleages (or male ones come to that) are not.

I remember a day last year I was working with a bunch of engineers ... in fact they were pretty important people in the company I was working in. I had a surprise meeting with the Head of IT... (much lower down the company) and suddenly realised that my nails had grease and I was wearing waterproof shoes not smart ones etc. (like the rest of the engineers I was working with)

The IT guy was wearing a business suit and looked like he'd stepped out of Esquire and sounded like he'd come straight from a speaking for MBA's course....

That's not to say he was less educated or intelligent either.... just that the engineers (and geologists) I worked with don't really put much stock in smooth looks or words... above practicality.

"BUT I doubt it is any different for the really serious Downhill families either?"

You're right. DH's bikes, trail bikes, servicing (suspension etc), traveling to top class DH venues to train/practice/race, accomodation, uplift tickets, entry fees, etc, etc. It's not cheap, I see the level of commitment my friend puts in with his lad. Paying off in results though.

"Isn’t it just that they just use different types of drugs?"

I don't think many DHer's have asthma .

IMHO its target audience....

and probably more money in road so more media types pampering/polishing the product.

You get to the bottom of a descent:

"WOW! Amazing! That was brilliant! ACE!"

An hour later.

"That was really good, I really enjoyed it."

A day later.

"That was a good descent"