With silly season news finally trickling in, I wanted to take a moment to write about one of the more interesting phenomena in the outdoor industry, world cup downhill mountain bike racing.
Today I woke up to the news that Greg Minnaar had signed with Norco Bicycles, a move nobody had on their bingo card in January of 2023. Greg is to mountain bike racing what Ted Williams is to baseball. He’s commonly referred to as the G.O.A.T. and despite being over 40 is a real podium contender week in, week out.
For those who don’t follow the sport of downhill mountain bike racing, its got elements of downhill ski racing, motocross and “old fashioned” mountain biking all wrapped into one Thunderdome style showdown that happens seven times per year throughout the world*. There are three classifications – Junior, Women and Men – all fighting for a limited number of spots in Sunday’s final show.
TV coverage has waxed and waned over the years, with Red Bull TV famously doing an incredible job propelling the sport more into “mainstream” viewing (as mainstream as RBTV could be anyway). Since, the series has been sold to Warner Brothers which has arguably been a big step backwards in terms of how engaging the series and the coverage has really been.
Like many other forms of racing, any given weekend sees a small percentage of the field fighting for the top 5 spots, with only your most diehard fans knowing (or caring) who finished outside the top 10 (in the men’s field). Important to note because for most of the field nobody cares.
Here is where things get interesting – to field a top tier team in 2024 will cost millions of dollars and its almost impossible to see how the investment is going to offer an ROI that is the best allocation of that capital against everything else in the marketing manager’s toolbox. The fragmenting of your ‘attention verticals’ is absolutely massive. Lets explore.
- Nobody Buys DH Bikes: I’m opening with one of the weaker arguments here, but its important for the rest of the article. Nobody buys downhill mountain bikes anymore. They are literally the least purchased form of a mountain bikes, being you must be able to shuttle to the top of a mountain/ride a chairlift and have terrain worthy of these types of steeds, which is in very short supply. So even if you prove to the world your bike is possibly the best, the only people who care are DH racers who never pay retail, live in their vans and would otherwise be considered the worst demographic you could ever try and build a business around.
- The TAM of Mountain Biking is Small: Though the sport is bigger than ever, the total addressable market of the specialty bicycling industry, specifically those wow’d by the gravity side of things, is very small relative to say – auto enthusiasts or football fans. According to most market research the size of the the entire global mountain bike market is roughly $6-7B. For context the size of the entire pickleball market is estimated to be worth around $65-66B. Mountain biking is very fragmented, too. With a myriad of different applications of the over arching idea of “the mountain bike”. While DH may be the most fun to watch, gravity riding/racing/equipment is a fraction of the entire market and has virtually zero non endemic fans (people who watch the sport but don’t mountain bike). This means your marketing dollars spent on WC DH are fairly limited in total reach based on market size & interest alone.
- Formula 1 It is Not: One analogy that is often drawn is “DH MTB is akin to formula 1”. After all, this would justify the “nobody buys DH bikes” problem (being nobody can buy a real F1 car). This case is best articulated by the mythical Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction stating “…its not in the same ballpark, its not even in the same league.” MTB o F1 is akin to your 4 year old nephew playing with a toy airplane saying to his Delta-flying pilot uncle “I fly airplanes too”. Its embarrassing we even try to make this comparison. Formula 1 an absolute bemouth of a machine for many reasons including size of market (huge), size of audience (biggest in the world), mainstream-ness (covered in every language), myriad forms of coverage it gets, number of billionaires with FU money who are adjacent to the sport (many) and the 100+ year prestige of auto sports. Mountain biking isn’t even a rounding error on the F1 yearly GDP…and that’s a fact.
- Moto isn’t MTB: Another often made analogy is for us to look at supercross or motocross racing. To start, SX/MX aren’t exactly thriving when you dig into it, but I do agree the moto teams have a more sustainable rationale with respect to supporting very expensive racing series which is simply this: Supercross events make real money and gets real exposure. Go to a supercross race. They are AWESOME. You can see the entire thing in a stadium somewhere in “normal America” then get in your car and be home in under ~30 minutes. To add, you often get kids who don’t participate in the sport falling in love with the likes of Eli Tomac, Ken Roczan or Jet Lawrence. Heroes. Legends. The sport bleeds outside the boundary of mere participation. This type of exposure and model drastically changes the dynamics of the sport. To add, the bikes most of these racers are riding are in principal closer to the bike a random Joe can go into their dealership and buy. Lots of people ride on the MX track relative to the percent of people who participate in true DH mountain biking (on a DH bike). This makes it much easier to justify the racing efforts in an apples to apples sales kind of way for the brands and is where the motif “win on sunday sell on monday” likely came from.
- Olympics: We as a species do weird wild things for the Olympics. In some obscure way this kind of makes sense, as it can be viewed as the ultimate showdown of human athleticism (I no longer believe this). Plus, like Visa proved, you can get a crap ton of positive exposure through the Olympics (if you are…Visa). I know, this debate likely doesn’t hold much water but it doesn’t even matter because DH mtb isn’t even in the Olympics and there is no plan to make it an Olympic sport.
- Ball Sports Teams vs Marketing Teams: This is an incredibly important distinction – the Dallas Cowboys are operating under an entirely different model than Santa Cruz Syndicate. in the former example, performance is directly tied to revenue generation and value. In the latter, is much more obscure and the real performance metric we are after is that of clicks, eyeballs and selling a bicycle (not a ticket). This is an important and critical delineation to make, and one that should level set all other forms of marketing against that of the “WC DH team”.
- Billionaire Backers: Unlike Liv golf or similar, DH mtb does not have some downhill loving billionaire or sovereign state looking to synthetically change the supply/demand dynamics for the athletes, teams, brand and sport. Its worth noting the extremely wealthy often have a hand in supporting other forms of racing, which is sometimes required to stabilize the base and athlete pay within the sport.
- The Marketing Backdrop Has Changed: The late 90s were considered to be one of the best times to be a DH Mtb WC athlete. Though I’d argue the last 5 years may in fact be better, the sport finding the limelight in the late 90s actually made a lot of sense based on one huge factor: there were fewer alternatives to allocate marketing budget. You didn’t have targeted social ads, YouTube reviewers, apps you could build, podcasts, VitalMTB/PB, Google Adwords, etc etc etc. The toolbox a marketer has now is exponentially bigger than it was 20 years ago, yet culture hasn’t updated to reflect this.
- Measurement: This is the one I struggle with the most. The tools a brand has to really measure the short, medium and long term impact fielding a world cup team can have on their underlying brand equity & topline sales is very challenging with a number of variables that cloud the equation. If sales go up, it could be because the broader industry is doing better (macro), the company releases a new suspension platform that proliferates through the range (technology), pricing is attractive, a handful of reviews are very positive and/or your athlete puts the name in the limelight. How does one assess what’s what? To add, the entire racing space is very cloak and dagger-ish with nobody really talking about who is getting paid what, and how brand’s are really measuring success. This hurts everyone involved, from athletes to teams to the brands themselves.
If I’m placed into the role of a “CMO” or “VP of Marketing” at a bike company looking to grow am given the budget of a World Cup mountain bike team, I’d scrutinize what else I could do with that amount of capital and make sure I’m aiming at solving the problem with the best tool (or set of tools) at my disposal. I’d Billy Bean it. I’d play some Moneyball (Moneybikes doesn’t have the same ring to it) and I am nearly 100% positive I could come up with a number of better ways to allocate this capital that is more measurable, less risky, higher ROI and offers broader improvements for the entirety of the company. To be fair, there has been a notable pullback in the racing space from 2023 to 2024 likely due to what I’m writing about, with a number of teams shuddering their doors.
Don’t misread, I’m not asking for DH mountain bike racing (or teams) to go away. Ultimately, my personal opinion is that I’d love to see a more stable, sustainable form of DH mountain bike racing to come into the foray. Currently, most talks surrounding “improving” the series focus on potentially reducing the size or similar. This is an attempt to optimize a non-critical function, and will not result in the type of material change needed to get the sport to a materially better place. Improving the value of the series will come from top tier production, promotion, creativity, cost management and leadership, all of which is currently absent from the series.
…all that said, I’m still excited for the racing to come this year. Cheers everyone!
Update 1/17 – Following the announcement of the Neko Mulally/Frameworks team I felt it was worth putting a little update at the bottom of this. For those who don’t know, he launched his team on 1/16 with three riders (including himself) on a total budget of $400K coming from outside the sport (WD-40). He’s utilizing this budget in a way even Billy Bean would say “damn, that’s impressive” to and has arguably the world’s fastest up and comer (Asa) on his bikes. For a brand like Frameworks running a team like Neko is running, there is no better use of resources and time than a WC DH Team. I’d argue this is very much the exception, not the rule, but if more teams ran themselves like this one, I’d throw this entire post in the trashcan. Cheers – and good luck Neko!