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The KTM Kapoho 27.5+ – more of everything?
The prospect of losing your bike for a week while TFTuned work their magic is always scary, particularly when the UK is enjoying the longest dry spell since the last ice age. Thankfully, my pal Henry Nottage at Tony Butterworth’s had a solution – a courtesy bike. However, he’s known me long enough to […]
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SHAFF2015 – Santa Cruz 5010 in Terrific Torridon
Santa Cruz 5010 may be a film promoting a product but it’s Steve Peat riding in beautiful Torridon, so it’s easy to forgive the product placement. It’s a little gem featuring a bona fide sporting hero, the production values are top notch, the riding is exceptional and the scenery is jaw dropping. This film made it a certainty […]
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Great Britain Mountain Biking – Tom Fenton & Andy McCandlish – Vertebrate Publishing
Over the years, Vertebrate Publishing have produced a series of area guides to Britains diverse mountain biking landscape. Detailed and authoritative, they’re arguably the best mountain bike guidebooks in the country. This mighty tome however is an attempt to encapsulate all that the UK has to offer, the best of the epics, quick blasts and […]
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Mountain biking – going downhill, but in a good way….
When someone as steeped in the world of mountain biking as Andy Waterman suggests that the sport is in decline, it’s got to be worth taking seriously and, in an article entitled ‘When Did it all Start to go Downhill for Mountain Biking‘ in the Independent, that’s exactly what he suggests. However, the picture he […]
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Won’t Back Down – The Steve Peat Story – Clay Porter and John Lawlor
I love a bit of mountain biking porn as much as the next man, but there comes a time when endless footage of riders pulling whips is no longer enough – what I need is a story, some larger-than-life characters, raw emotion and triumph over adversity. Clay Porter’s Won’t Back Down is feast after famine, […]
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Steve Peat- Sheffield’s man of steel….
Mention retirement and Steve Peat looks at you as if you’ve suggested he drink alcohol-free lager. He’s racing as hard as ever and Clay Porter has released a film about the Steve Peat phenomenon. Then there’s the Steve Peat Syndicate, his involvement in all things Sheffield, family life. Then there’s the first time I ever met […]
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Best of Shaff 2013
Shaff 2013 served up its usual eclectic mix of adventure films and here’s your chance to catch those you missed first time round. Included are a couple of fine mountain bike films. Strength in Numbers by Anthill Films includes the usual mountain bike porn, unfeasibly brilliant riding at warp speed, but finds room for a […]
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Sometimes I hate mountain bikers….
It’s not just any old frost that excites the committed mountain biker. It really needs to be three days of minus four frigidity, weather that will prompt cataclysmic predictions from the Daily Express of thousands of deep frozen grannies and empty shelves at the supermarket. Only then can we be sure the bogs will […]
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Lake District Mountain Bike Routes – Tom Hutton
Lake District Mountain Bike Routes Tom Hutton Out There Guides – £13.95 Tom Hutton, route aficionado for Mountain Bike Rider magazine for 13 years, has now turned his hand to publishing guides to Britain’s best trails. First up is his take on the best the Lake District has to offer and if anyone should know, […]
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I’ve seen the future – bike park wales….
A knackered Rowan Sorrell was good enough to tell me all about the new bike park near Merthyr Tydfil recently, here’s the result:
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Rights of passage
Depending on who you believe, Gary Fisher or Joe Breeze built the first mountain bike in the seventies. As it goes, I reckon it was Joe Breeze but, whoever it was and whenever it was, it was a decade too late. If they’d had that flash of inspiration earlier, we wouldn’t be in the mess […]
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Pivot Mach 5.7 – a quick spin….
I’ve been very aware of the hype surrounding the Mach 5.7 so when The Bike Tree let me know they’d got one I could test, I took off my pinny, switched off the hoover, put Jeremy Kyle on record and headed out sharpish. All the talk in the biking media was of incredibly well sorted suspension, superb build quality, of a […]
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Cotic Rocket
I know how these things are supposed to go. I’m supposed to blind the reader with science, with talk of head angles, chain growth and frame rates leaving all but the geeky one per cent flummoxed and the average rider none the wiser about whether this bike is the best thing since pro-pedal or an […]
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Sheffield Moors Partnership Access and Recreation Focus Group Meeting, June 26
The Sheffield Moors Partnership has brought together all the bodies who manage moorland on the fringes of Sheffield. The National Trust, RSPB, Peak District National Park Authority, Sheffield Wildlife Trust and others have joined forces to see how much they can synchronise their management policies across some of the most popular and important moorland in […]