ROCK FACES

After three long years the Ard Rock enduro is back... so how did the riders rate it?

By golly, we’ve missed this. Racing by day before partying by night; the mountain bike festival format is as old as the sport itself and taps into what most of us truly love about mtb – great riding and a sense of community.

For 18 months we’ve been denied the hedonism, but now the calendar is waking up, with events like the Enduro World Series in the Tweed Valley, the Malverns Classic, the Ex Enduro and loads more rounding out the summer season. We went along to the biggest of them all, the Ard Rock Enduro, to find out how riders felt, returning after three long years (2019 was a washout for the Dales event). Relief? Sheer bloody abandonment to hedonism? Or a more sober look at what events like this really mean to us?

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The Yorkshire Dales becomes an mtb paradise for one glorious weekend

The pump-track challenge always pulls in a healthy audience