THE 2010S

Mountain biking's in a better place than ever – where will the next developments take us?

Now we head into our most recent era. Sure, we’ve grown up a little, but we still know how to have fun, and can be more than a little reckless on occasion! We started the decade by sending pioneering trials rider Chris Akrigg to San Francisco to reinterpret the classic action flick Bullitt (with a bad-guy cameo from MTB legend Gary Fisher), wasted no time in grabbing Danny MacAskill to be guest editor of our Scottish issue and started on a long list of remote and often dangerous/absurd travel adventures with MBUK regular Dan Milner, as he headed to Nepal. He’s since taken bikes across Afghanistan and Lebanon, and is currently trying to fund a trip to North Korea…

Not ones to shy away from a challenge, several of our staffers took on the infamous Megavalanche – they crashed, they burned but ultimately survived. We’ve ridden the Rovaniemi 150, across a sub-zero Arctic snowscape, checked out Norway’s surreal Hillbilly Huckfest and, by the time you read this, should have just about completed the Trans BC Enduro – look out for more on that in a future issue. In 2012, we became the first cycling magazine to use augmented reality (in its infancy back then), bringing our cover shot of Brendan Fairclough to life via the magic of smartphone technology.

We were all deeply saddened when our founding technical editor, Steve Worland, died suddenly in 2013. The foundations he put in place back in the ’80s still form the basis of all the testing we do. Not to mention he was a lovely bloke.

Bike technology was dominated by the great wheel size debate – it kept rearing its head like an early version of Brexit. First it was 29ers, then it was trying to explain what 650b was all about and the benefits of each over the familiar 26in. Finally, along came plussize tyres to muddy the waters further. Now all the fuss has died down a bit, we can turn our attention to the less contentious issue of... e-bikes. Oh.

Trail/enduro bikes have become the staple right now – full-suspension bikes with incredibly capable suspension and fantastic geometry that’ll let you ride just about anywhere. They’re a far cry from the machines we first reported on back in the ’80s.

Dropper posts are easily one of the biggest developments in the past 20 years, with the likes of the RockShox Reverb and Fox Transfer topping many people’s wish lists. The kit we ride in has become far more technical yet looks more casual, and we’re seeing bigger cassettes (size and number of sprockets) paired with single front chainrings, which simplifies things for riders and bike designers alike.

And… well, we could go on but we’ve run out of space! Mountain biking and MBUK have come a long way in a relatively short amount of time. Judging by what we’ve achieved in just 30 years, there's one hell of a ride still to come – we hope you stick with us to find out where it’s all heading next…