#27 Guy Kesteven – Are MTB categories a marketing lie or are bikers just weird?

The mountain bike industry is obsessed with acronyms, and after decades of marketing buzzwords like "EVO," "Aggressive," "Downcountry," and the (now fading) Enduro-Race, it feels like we’ve finally reached peak confusion. We spent years defining our sport, only to throw the rulebook out the window the moment e-bikes hit the scene. But are these ever-shifting categories actually helping you find the right tool for the trail, or are they just a clever way to sell you the "N+1" bike you don't really need?

In this episode of the Testpilot podcast, Jens Staudt sat down with industry veteran Guy Kesteven to strip away the "Excel spreadsheet" side of mountain biking. From the 32-inch wheel debate and the evolution of VPP versus Horstlink suspension to the honest reality of whether geometry innovation has hit a plateau, we’re cutting through the marketing noise. Whether you're a bike nerd with a garage full of vintage frames or a rider wondering if your bike is "capable enough," this is the reality check you’ve been waiting for.

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Transcript

Guy Kesteven (03:47.697)
La la la la la la la.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (04:06.837)
on the nerd side of things. bikes. Two wheeled fun machines which came a long way and a lot of history. So today we are talking with the true, we could say mountain bike legend, right? Because...

Guy Kesteven (04:23.091)
I think veteran. think veteran. If we're going to be chatting about categories later, Jens, the spaces where I'm a legend are so very, very small and niche. think I'm generally assigned as veteran old cactus in the desert gnome. I don't know if that translates into German, but yeah, the old bearded ornamental guy in the garden. The paint's kind of coming off.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (04:28.877)
you

Jens – Testpilot.bike (04:49.217)
I mean, you're in the in-

Guy Kesteven (04:53.164)
But you just, they haven't got rid of him just yet.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (04:55.893)
Are you underselling yourself? mean, guy, Kestavin, so you heard him already, he's doing bike media for, you could say almost 30 years. Testerman.

Guy Kesteven (05:07.857)
Yeah, pretty much. I haven't checked the exact month, but yeah, I think my first piece was in an MBI in 1996, sometime about now, so yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (05:16.513)
Yeah. And, and in that period of time, he tested more bikes than people. Yeah. All in their lifetime, I would say.

Guy Kesteven (05:28.627)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's not as busy now as it was but yeah the first two decades for sure were crazy. Yeah, we'd be doing like 10-12 bikes a month.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (05:39.937)
Yeah, and if you can tell by the accent, Yorkshire Lad...

Guy Kesteven (05:46.355)
I up North in Yorkshire where the weather is beautiful as I can see from the rain falling on the velox at the moment. But yeah, I mean great place, great place to test bikes. You know, we're wearing out this breaks and ruin it. Sorry. We're wearing out rims and crying out for disc brakes well before the Americans had even developed a bomb, you know, suspension bearing that wasn't made out of cheese. So yeah, it's a good place for breaking people and bikes. So

Jens – Testpilot.bike (05:50.39)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (05:54.251)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (06:10.999)
They love to hear that. They love.

Guy Kesteven (06:15.152)
Yeah, that's why I've stayed here, primarily.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (06:17.521)
So we're talking because a cast, tester man, guy, he has many names, but he saw a lot of categories come up, grow, disappear, being reshaped. It's an ever evolving.

how you say that. Yeah, the categories evolved a lot over the time. And sometimes...

Guy Kesteven (06:42.746)
Yeah, it's like rats on a big ball of shit rolling down a sewer. You know, one will come to the top and then that rat will like swing the ball around and another rat will appear. And it's all so pretty messy and a lot of squeaking and a lot of fighting and yeah, it just, and, then it pretty, I mean, a lot of it's decided by whichever publisher decides to put the image on the front of the magazine back in the day, certainly. And now I guess it's click, you know, it's what gets the clicks.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (06:53.344)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (07:13.505)
Yeah, you see this is going to be explicit.

Guy Kesteven (07:17.165)
sorry. Sorry, is there a no rats policy or a no shit policy? Sorry.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (07:21.133)
No, for no reason. No, you see, there's a lot of fighting and I mean the mountain bike community itself is diverse, but we love to keep fighting each other as well. And so who's the cooler lad in the end and who has the better toy doing the more crazy stuff. But yeah, we're trying to find or talk about

Guy Kesteven (07:34.159)
absolutely, yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (07:49.015)
the categories, how they evolved, what are categories in particular, because if you look at other sports, I mean, we are outsiders. I don't know how much you are into surfing them, potentially long boards, short boards, whatever boards, and it's the same thing. Yeah.

Guy Kesteven (08:06.438)
Yeah. Sup boards, powered boards, foil boards now. Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (08:12.553)
And the idea is like mountain biking started with some idiots bombing down hills with bikes that supposed to be used for this. in over the last 30 years, pretty much 40 years, it got a pretty crazy beast. And if you look at world cup today, I mean, downhill world cup, cross country world cup, now e-bike world cup.

It's like one sport doesn't really have much to do with the other anymore. So what is mountain biking at all?

Guy Kesteven (08:49.926)
Well, well, it kind of does. And it kind of doesn't, doesn't it? Cause like there's constant interplay by all of that. You know, whether you've got PigCat, PigCock saying he wants to do rampage or you've got disc brakes and dropper posts and 2.4 inch tires on XC bikes or downhill bikes and they're carbon. mean, yeah, they were, they're all strapping lead weights to their carbon bikes now because they decided that lightweight wasn't the way to go. like 10 years ago.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (08:55.053)
Yeah.

Guy Kesteven (09:20.018)
And I think that's it. Everybody's always, you know, it's the mountain bikers way. We're not just in a road game, just staring at the cassette in front of us, which if you do that, I mean, that's why you have the same bike in 1920 as you have in 1990. If you're road bike and you just like, I like riding this road and I like riding it with the friends I like riding it with. And I'll just continue doing that on me five, three, one steel bicycle. And you can do that for 70 years and you're fine. mean, mountain biking.

I mean, the publicized version of mountain biking started because the Californians got sick of that or Gary Fisher got his hair tangled in somebody's wheels or something because it was too long. And they go, Gary, go and play in the hills. You've been bad. And so, but even then, even that story's just fraught with like, well, actually I did it or Joe Breeze did it first. Yeah. But Joe Breeze took so long to weld his bikes that he wasn't actually making production bikes. And then, you know, it's like, and then you hear Steve Jones going.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (10:16.653)
Mike.

Guy Kesteven (10:18.372)
on the EMTB going, well, to be honest, I was riding down Welsh mountains in 1960 on my Trakka bike and I invented it well before that, but I was too busy having fun to give it a name and be Californian and take over the world like Americans do. And there's kids in France, pictures of them jumping out of bomb craters. And, you know, I'm sure you were asking about in the woods before your mum would let you buy a mountain bike. And so was I, you know, I wasn't allowed on because the

the guys collecting the trash wouldn't fit into the back passage of our house. But we may do. I think, sorry, I've kind of, at the risk of jumping right to the conclusion, I think that it's mountain bikers have never liked being categorized in the same way as they've never liked having an overriding organization.

And there's been so many sort of kind hearted groups who, whether they're racers or whether it's like Imba or something for access and they're like, if we all band together and agree, we can progress in a way that, you know, in a way that's understandable to normal people. And we go, yeah, but I want that kind of jump. It's like, I don't like berms. It's like, they've gone through a nature reserve. It's like, wouldn't it be better if you all had a green flow trail?

don't want one of them, they're boring. You know, it's, again, it's just like the same with every attempt to categorize it. We're almost willfully, I think is the part of the problem is companies would love to be able, I categories are so you can stack things on shelves. At the end of the day, no one actually needs a category. The only reason categories are good because when it comes into a, when they make the bike, they can go, it's this kind of bike. So it matches.

these kinds of bikes from these other people. So when it goes into a shop, we can put it between this bike, that bike and that bike. And then when the customer comes in, you can go, I think you'll like that bike. And it just, it's just trying to make mountain biking into an Excel spreadsheet at the end of the day. So you can count it and so you can go, Oh, you know, the accountant who maybe doesn't even ride a bike can go, ah, well, all mountain is very popular. And you go, what the?

Guy Kesteven (12:40.687)
All mounting.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (12:42.699)
hopeful mountain, a mountain bike.

Guy Kesteven (12:44.393)
Yeah, I mean, because I mean, there's even different, you know, there's even differences between like the words that we use in our media and you guys have traditionally used in like German media. Like, you, like tour used to be a massive category. I don't know if it still is in Germany. His tour used to be a massive category for those kind of very efficient, quite uptight, geo, but very, very light for suspension bikes.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (12:54.935)
Yeah. I mean.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (13:00.479)
No, nobody talks about tour anymore.

Guy Kesteven (13:13.121)
that we didn't really know what to do with because we don't have hills that long enough to really sit there and pedal that long or know spend hours getting down them but you know but so we'd have a complete you know that's probably maybe even down country so i don't know you know there's all these different categories at different points and i think the only time that categories do help is when they're simple and clear enough

to tell a relevant story.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (13:41.389)
think we kind of have a rough framework of what we agreed on as an industry. could say like hardtails, very specific breed, but then you can have somewhat, I used to say cross country, then there's something like marathon. Not a lot of people talk about marathon anymore. There's like then trail, enduro, free ride, rising again right now.

lot of new bikes coming and then you have downhill and downhill race. So this was like something that people can agree on and they have a certain understanding of what kind of travel these category has and what kind of geometry. Even though cross country bikes also got shorter stems, we're not running 120 stems anymore like we did way back. We have bigger tires.

Guy Kesteven (14:36.881)
Yeah

Jens – Testpilot.bike (14:38.103)
We have, you mentioned earlier, a dropper post also on cross-country bikes. We have maybe also full suspension, not only hard tails on cross-country, right? Rays and stuff like that. But still you mentioned it. It's, in the bike shop, you have a lot of, yeah, the customer wants to go into a shop, explain what he wants to do. And maybe the shop owner sells him a product and he wants to be happy and knowing

that he has the right tool for the job. But what is the job? And the customer is not in the woods or the forest with the bike shop owner and they can't like see each other how the customer rides the bike or what he's able to do it because you see crazy people doing crazy stuff on short travel bikes and yeah, breaking out of categories. So...

Even we as media, we don't have what kind of right we have to have an opinion on a bike that a brand makes and say, this has too not enough travel for the category or it just like this beats you up. Maybe we didn't understand the product right.

Guy Kesteven (15:58.15)
Yeah, I mean, cause that's interesting. Going back to talking about tour when that was a German category, we didn't get that at all in the UK because all our climbs are horrible, slippery, rooty, janky and short. So we needed a bike that was quite fluid peddling or, you know, quite an aggressive climbing bike. And then they're all slippery and nasty and horrible going down. So we wanted the front right out in front of us, you know, like we're chasing a wheel, we'd barrow down the trail.

You know, when we went as fussed about pedaling efficiency, we wanted really smooth suspension. We wanted bikes that you probably look at geometrically and think, well, that's basically a downhill bike, but it's a hard tail. What are you doing? I mean, they make no sense at all. And, you know, and again, that reflected the market. You know, I always remember going on a press trip for continental tires test just after the Athertons had started running continental tires. And one of the English guys going,

Have you made us a mud tire yet? And it was great because Continental were really, really frank and just went, no, no, because right now it's really important that we make sure this tire that will sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions of around the world, lasts okay if we leave it on top of a shed in like India and it gets baked. Because that's really important to far more of our riders than a tire that will maybe sell 50 of.

to Welsh people and those 50, 35 of them will get a deal from the shop. And anywhere else in the world, it will wear out in about two weeks. Cause we know how soft you need them for your stupid riding. Cause you don't have snow, you don't have any winter sports. So you just carry on riding your bikes when you shouldn't. And so, yeah, frankly, you're so tiny. You don't really matter. We will do it cause the Athertons need one.

We can't use a Sharpie to write out the names of other tires forever if we're to be sponsoring them with a tire. But, that was great, as a tester, that was so good to hear because you vanish up your little pipe and you're like, you know, your head goes up your butt and you think, well I know everything. You know, that's the funniest thing about being in the game for so long is I can remember like three, four years in, I knew everything I needed to know about mountain bike.

Guy Kesteven (18:25.166)
You know, it's still talking like 80 mil travel forks for downhill and URT suspension as far as I've said. I ain't ridden nothing better so that was great. And the older I get, the more I realize, the less I realize I know, if you see what I mean. And certainly I think the other interesting thing is how media has changed. Because when we started, if we said something, that was it. Because nobody had a voice to say anything different.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (18:40.3)
Mm-hmm.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (18:54.763)
Yeah, now you have everybody has a voice.

Guy Kesteven (18:55.162)
You know, we could go, this is the new category of thing. And the magazines would go, no, the manufacturers go, is it? Or the manufacturers go, this is the new category of thing. We go, right, okay, well, we'll do a cover on that. You know, this is the new thing. This is North Shore, or this is Freeride or whatever. And we'd have like Bender going off, yating off a cliff. Or, you know, someone riding skinnies. And we've created all these.

ridiculous things, you know, to try and, or just to try and, and they're all the distraction from what most people actually do on a mountain bike, you know, and it's kind of, and we've dragged ourselves further. mean, I think really the turn of the century is when we started, God, that makes me sound ancient, but like 25, 26 years ago is when we started dragging ourselves away, certainly in the UK and America, from what most people were doing as mountain biking, which is,

going out for a really nice water ride in the woods, in nature, maybe getting a bit out of breath if they wanted, or maybe getting a bit terrified in the downhill if they wanted. just the massive herd was all doing that. Some of them put a number, well, thousands of them if it was Germany, put a number on and got their arses spanked by an 80 year old woman in hot pants, which was my experience of German mountain bike marathon racing when we did it on press trips. you know, was essentially the bikes weren't really that different.

But suddenly, if you put some kid in a misty Canadian forest on a ladder in an Ewok village, I was like, my God, that looks exciting. And so the publishers went, we need more of that, please. And we still see it today. It's like, you know, the funny thing is like ultra racing now is really cool in gravel. They're getting to the point where they go gravel bikes are rubbish. We should just ride mountain bikes. That's happening now. But.

If you actually look at the start list is hilarious because you think, you know, my social feed is full of people and they all have their life story below them about why they aren't quite ready to race this, but for the good of their personal heart or their current, you know, specified mental health condition, they're going to do it anyway. And then you actually look at the start list, there's 65 people doing the Highland Trail or something like that.

Guy Kesteven (21:13.296)
Which is great, because it's a new thing and it encourages more people to go, well maybe I could do it there doing 550 miles, maybe I could do 100 or something like that. But then people go, oh no, cross country racing's dead. But you turn up to like a really local like fish and chip race in some godforsaken rainy quarry in Lancashire, you know, that looks like the misery scene out of Wuthering Heights. And there's a hundred blokes your age who've been doing it for

40 years and you go, right, get me ass handed to me again. yet, no, cross country racing is dead. And it's just like, again, it's a perception. You know, we stopped putting maps in magazines because nobody was reading. No, we didn't. We, they were just a bit more expensive because you have to make the paper better. And so the publishers can, and you know, and so we, we, we're guilty of it. We've accelerated of it. But now what's happening, sorry to get, finally get back to my original point is.

is people now have much more of a voice. You know, the Pinkbike Forum is a very, very powerful voice. And if you've got any sense, you'll be looking at that very, very carefully and going, we really screwed up there. We prodded the wrong hornets nest there. I mean, look how quickly, like specialized on Santa Cruz have stopped making wireless only frames. Because they both came out with a wireless only trail bike within a couple of months of each other. And I remember talking to people at Santa Cruz,

Jens – Testpilot.bike (22:13.335)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Kesteven (22:41.264)
I'm going, have you seen what special I've done? You can't put cables in a stuff jumper. And then I'm yeah, about that. you haven't. Yeah, they're in there already shipping. yeah, better get the Dremel out. Better get the drill out on those mates. You know, you're need to change. now, but then we're seeing things. But also there's this weird thing where people really don't like change. And we were chatting about this the other day because the toolbar came out yesterday.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (23:06.017)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Kesteven (23:09.038)
You know, classic Santa Cruz, again, Santa Cruz bike, classic bike always. Well, it hasn't. mean, thing is, everybody forgets that Santa Cruz didn't start with VPP. Santa Cruz started with single pivots and only did some weird stuff that Cedric Gracia road. I mean, VPP has been around since about 2000, I'm thinking from, you know, early bikes I rode at Lake Garda and stuff like that, under blankets.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (23:09.377)
Yes.

Guy Kesteven (23:35.598)
But even then, those VPP bikes are radically different to the VPP bikes now. You know, what the wheel actually does. And even then they were lying when they started this, it had an S-shaped axle curve. It didn't. It didn't, but we were like, does it? Right, okay, that sounds great. We'll just print that. You know, and a few people went, whatever. But now, know, reason, but they've shifted now to a four bar, and everyone's gone like.

I mean, it's very funny. It's like counting the age, it's counting the rings on a tree. You can see how old people are in the forums by how they go, it looks like if they're relatively new to Metapark, it looks like a Norco or a Trek. And then you get silly old songs like me going, actually it's a Turner from 1992, if you want to be really specific about it. But again, you know, it's weird. In some ways there's a massive resistance to stuff. I mean, 32 inch is a prime example.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (24:11.821)
Hahaha

Guy Kesteven (24:32.185)
because

Jens – Testpilot.bike (24:32.455)
Choose a category and bitch about it. Is it that?

Guy Kesteven (24:38.911)
Well people like bitching about stuff don't they? mean isn't that what the number one thing the internet has proved? Disagreeing with people is huge fun and addictive.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (24:46.967)
Yeah. The question is, the chicken and egg principle, we're talking about what we kind of agreed on on categories. And who's coming up with them? Is it just people doing stuff? You mentioned North Shore. And then the industry put the free ride label on it. Or is it just chicken letters category? How you would call it? Is this just something new to

to slap on a product as a label to sell it.

Guy Kesteven (25:19.609)
I mean even that was quite... Do you remember when Freeride came out and Cannondale tried to patent it? And then all the original Canadian freeriders became the fro-riders.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (25:25.741)
Yeah, that's reason they...

Yeah, because it was a legal issue.

Guy Kesteven (25:33.933)
Yeah. You know, mean, the only reason mountain bikes was taken up as mountain bikes, not ATB or Velo Tutoran is because the patent lawyer that Gary Fisher and Charlie Kelly got into patent the name of their shop got it wrong. And so they had a shop called Mountain Bikes and they were selling those mountain bikes and everyone went, they're mountain bikes then. You know, it's funny. It's like, and that, and again, that's beyond anyone's control. So I was chatting to my wife yesterday about, she said,

I've seen loads of those turn bikes with kids, you know, behind, you know, taking kids to school recently, because I've had a turn on test. And it's just like, oh, did it have the, you know, me being a pedantic little git went, oh, did it have the kids in front? She's like, oh, he had four kids with him. I was like, did it have the kids in front? And she was like, yeah, I was like, well, that's not a turn then, because they don't do that. But it's really interesting that turn is now almost, it's like Hoover has become the name for vacuum cleaner.

in the UK and the US where you get into kind of dominant brand. And so that stuff's always been, I mean, I don't know who, mean, it's just like 36 and 32 inch wheels being around forever. And I don't know who's kind of like gone, right, okay, right. Let's make that a thing. know, why is that suddenly appearing on World Cup bikes? We've had people converting bikes to run unicycle wheels for probably as long as we have with 29ers.

And we've had 20 diners, 25 years. And now we've got the same, the same people coming out with pitchforks to chase the monster out of the castle with 32. The same people who doing it at 29. So, oh, it's only for tall people. The handling will be shit. There's, never get much travel out of it. And it's like, didn't we do all this 25 years ago and it will go too far and it will come back. Like everything else does in mountain biking, know, bikes get really, really long. You know, they go to the North Pole and then pole.

die and they come back a bit because you know, it's handy to be actually able to fit a bike in your garage or in your van and, or get it around the corner, you know, and it's all, but at end of the day, there will always still be outliers at that. But each time you do that, you're at risk of kind of blowing this categorization open because the categorization is always shifting. You know, like you were saying, you know, XC bikes and now what were trail bikes? Not that long ago.

Guy Kesteven (27:56.312)
And now trail bikes are free riding, duro bikes, really. You your trail bike now can possibly take a 170 mil fork and it's got category five strength to it because somebody is going to eat it off a jump they can't clean and then go and cry into the warranty department. And then everybody goes, why does my, why does my exercise bike wear as much as an e-bike? Well, it's got a

Jens – Testpilot.bike (28:01.325)
or dead.

Guy Kesteven (28:22.191)
dropper that's two and a half meters long, it weighs over a kilo. The tires are a kilo and a half each. Your aluminium frame weighs five and a half pounds. And somebody goes, well, this is really hard to pedal and it's not much heavier than an e-bike, so I'll get an e-bike. And so again, what we're looking at is basically shorts, trying to put stick, I don't know, do you have this expression? Trying to pin a tail on a donkey.

It's an English-like expression. There's a party going for children where you literally blindfold them and they stick a tail on the donkey. What would you ever do that? But nobody's told the donkeys to stand still.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (28:47.351)
Okay.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (28:50.945)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (29:00.237)
currently. And you mentioned...

Guy Kesteven (29:01.943)
Yeah, which makes an ass of us all. sorry.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (29:05.415)
You mentioned the ultra racing and how it maybe at some point becomes a cross country bike again, like a mountain bike again. And maybe the categories are shifting. And now, first of all, they try to make wider tires on a road bike and call it a gravel. Then they make it at some point, maybe, hey, don't put curly, whirly bars on it. Maybe put a straight bar on it. Wow, we have a nineties mountain bike with a slacker head angle now.

Guy Kesteven (29:08.402)
ahem

Guy Kesteven (29:13.839)
course it will.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (29:33.877)
and maybe 32 inch wheels. And people will start pushing the limits of these bikes and taking it from the gravel road and the maybe flow traily things into more some rough stuff. And then they say, this is maybe odd. It needs to be more capable. Maybe we should put a suspension on it. And then you have the marathon bike again.

Guy Kesteven (29:54.467)
Yeah, exactly.

Because I mean, gravel was nothing new. We know that. It's right, you you can find pictures of old boys with pipes in, you know, tweed trousers going on exactly the same. I'm from the rough stuff. I'm sure there's a German one. There was a French one where they would literally pull the bikes apart, like pack howitzers to get them up to the top of the mountains using via forage and stuff like that. There's people been doing, I mean, for a start, there were no roads. When people started cycling, all riding was a best gravel.

You know, my mum used to go out and sit up and bake three-spin and come bombing down mountains in Wales. Cause well, that's what there was. There were no roads, but the great, the reason gravel caught on and it became a category is because you're selling to a totally new demographic. It's much more inspiring rather than intimidating because cross country had got to the point where, you know, there's only so many

situations where you can see someone absolutely roid-raged. I'm kind of talking back to the sort of few decades ago now, but where they're so roid-raged and like, yeah, coming over the finish line, like Philip Meagher. I remember being on the Press Life special launch when he got busted and you're like, really? Well, there's a surprise. The guy's running like 300 PSI in his arms. And weirdly, selling a sport around blood bags.

is to a certain audience, but when you're talking to like, you we're in a lot of gentler age, I think now, young people, you know, seem to be much more keen to go out in the woods and be nice to each other and actually operate as a hopefully, yeah, no, let's not look at the dark side of this, but there seems to be a lovely culture around gravel, you know, and in the same way as when you look at really early mountain bike, there's way more girls in the photos and just going out and just enjoying it for the sake of it rather than having to make it into a bloody competition.

Guy Kesteven (31:54.349)
And I think what we're now seeing, what I really want to see is XC being sold with bike bags, not blood bags, because there's a 66 degree head angle keeps you tracking straight and safe at the end of a very long day in the mountains with bike bags on in exactly the same way as it does. You know, if you're at the last hour, you know, if you're a Nova Mesto absolutely

banked out of your mind, you can't see anymore. know, and same way as disc brakes do, is the same way as a long top tube goes on a dropper post. All of those things, because I mean, that's a whole other subject, but the whole language around it, it's like, if we talk about it on gravel bikes, when I've done copy for gravel bike launches and stuff like that, when I've been on a side quest, actually trying to earn some real money, you know, we talk about it as safety. But we talk about, mountain bikes talk about exactly the same thing as on mountain bikes, as speed. You know, rah, rad.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (32:45.591)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Kesteven (32:52.334)
Shroud, know, shred. Whereas if I'm writing for like a Grand Canyon on, I'm not going, well, it's, you know, it's a lovely, it's a neutral riding position. It gives you more confidence. It means novice riders. And that's the thing, you know, we've even like stuff like, you say progressive, it's not progressive. It's just better. You know, my wife, I remember my wife riding with like a 29er for the first time. She'd go, this is good. I go over bumps better. So it's smoother for me. And then she rode bikes with slacker geometry. She went, well, I don't feel as I'm not.

wobbling all over the place. I'm like going, well, yeah. And again, we're back to that bleed, sorry, round again to that bleed through from DH to XC.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (33:24.17)
My wife

Jens – Testpilot.bike (33:31.226)
My wife wrote of 29er first and she was like, wow, this is too fast.

And then maybe, I don't know if we want to open that can of worms. If you look at BMX bikes, they haven't changed much and they're still doing insanely crazy stuff on them. And then, but there is no free ride BMX. I mean, there are some weird parts out there, like with full suspension and big tires, like fingers crossed Ruben Alcatrana does some interesting things, but it's not really catching on. And, uh,

It's a sub sub subculture and it's not growing as much. So bringing us back to the point, the industry, does it actually need the categories to sell more bikes? I would say yes. Because you, you, you, you feel the urge or the need, I want to do like this more radical writing and I need a more radical bike. So it's like an N plus one.

Guy Kesteven (34:34.478)
Yeah, and you can't sell people that more radical bike unless you promote that more radical riding. Normally. I mean, there are some instances where the market takes a bike that, know, does move the manufacturers. I mean, the classic example of that one was that Stumpjumper Evo. When that first came out, that was a one size alloy only model. And it was like, go on then, you've all made...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (34:51.319)
Yeah, absolutely.

Guy Kesteven (35:00.746)
so much for us about a slacker, longer, lower eaver, know, lower stump jump. You've told us his ours is too steep, it's too short. We'll make one, it won't sell and we'll prove, you know, and we'll prove it as a stupid idea. Instantly, they they send them out for test. No editor returns them because they go, this is the best bike you've ever made. They tell everyone that, everyone who rides one goes, this is the best bike I've ever ridden from specialized. And suddenly they can't sell stump jumpers.

You know, but you know, and you know, that becomes their lead is selling right. You everybody wants to stomp, jumper, Evo. But again, you know, yes, it's a better bite. Or is that just trend? You know, you kind of don't know there was that bit where Enduro went back to steeper bikes again. And now, you know, and I was checked specialized again, some brand and again, we're getting into some brands, some, this is a very English thing. Like their Evo bikes on the Epic. So really, really well in the UK.

globally, not really. Everyone still likes racing globally. They don't want a T9 super soft compound tire on the front and a longer fork. know, they'd know they bought an XC bike. They'd like to do XC things, please. So, but I think going back to your point about BMX, I think the key difference there is BMX has a very, very strong culture. You know, and it's very heavily policed. You know, you think no dig, no ride.

That does not work in mountain biking, does it? The proportion of diggers to riders in mountain biking is pathetic. the same, know, I don't think, I'm no great expert on the cycle speedway scene, you know, or the, you know, the cycle gymnastics or bicycle polo, but pretty sure that didn't get revolutionized by, you know, carbon frames or anything like that. Yeah, I mean, we saw carbon frames in BMX for racing, but again, that's a specific subset, you know, the going out and digging in the woods.

I mean, there's only, what, you get a long BMX or a short one? That's about it. I mean, it's like, how motocross is done. Everyone goes, motocross bikes have really good value compared to mountain bikes. It's like, yeah, because you ride the same bike between getting plunked on top of it at age five, you know, and then maybe if you really grow, you get a bigger seat to put on it. But otherwise, it's the same shaped bike and there's six, there's four.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (37:22.381)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Kesteven (37:27.246)
four or five major manufacturers and then maybe another five on top of that. You know, there's not, I remember switching from one magazine to another and then go, we want to get in every bike from every manufacturer for a mega test. I was like, huh? I was like, why you do that 50 test? Isn't that all, I know for NBR, isn't that all the bikes? Well, oh hell no. That's one from each of the ones who actually bother to respond when we ring them up. Cause this is like pre-email. And like, oh.

Oh, they're quite a lot then because they come from a motorcycle background. As far as they were concerned, if they had Suzuki, Kawasaki, Honda, and whatever Italian brand wasn't obviously blowing up at the time. You know, they were, that's like, right, we've got them all. That's fine. Oh, and then, you know, whatever English brand had been brought back from the dead by the Indians. Now there's literally six bikes and they were done. You know, and there is, and there's easy categorization there because nobody cares what size the wheels are on a motorbike. You know, because

Jens – Testpilot.bike (38:22.881)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Kesteven (38:24.585)
We just, you know, think it goes back to that start when you said in the very intro, you know, we're mountain bike nerds. And maybe, maybe that's the issue with categorization. We're determined to feel like we're special by going, no, my category.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (38:34.807)
Who got to say?

Jens – Testpilot.bike (38:39.895)
Who got to say? Again, like we were coming back to that question. Like when you say we're doing a field test, right? And the magazine says, okay, this is the best bike. You're doing a field test on enduro bikes. Like this is the best enduro bike. Can you actually say that? I say you can't because there is no such thing as a best product. And it depends, you mentioned it earlier, the bikes very, very much.

in your area, like the best performing bikes, to somewhere else in the world. And it's tire choice, it's gearing, it's wheel size, it's amount of travel. And how dare you can say as a magazine, this is the best bike of the category. Every brand out there has a specific understanding of what a category is and has its individual strengths. We noticed at some point when we tested bikes at

Guy Kesteven (39:14.807)
Yeah, absolutely.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (39:37.869)
on our trails and had the chance to do a company visit, house call and riding the bikes in their backyard. Wait a minute, why they are working so much better here, Santa Cruz in Monterrey area.

Guy Kesteven (39:55.425)
Yeah, Pivot in Arizona. Yeah, that's a classic one.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (39:56.653)
in a chunky Phoenix South Mountain. And if you're taking it to somewhere else, like, this is somewhat weird now. And you need a different setup. It doesn't work properly anymore. I mean, I have in my phone, I have a gigantic list of all the bikes I rode and put the setup in there. Like I ride the bike, I put all the PSI, the clickers, everything. And then I ride it somewhere else and...

then suddenly I need to change all the clickers. So it's always down to the fact that the bike needs to be adapted to a certain riding area and to a certain riding style.

Guy Kesteven (40:39.895)
Yeah, I mean, there are only ever two instances where a bike genuinely stands out in a test and you feel totally comfortable. And one is price. You know, you've just like, you've got five bike. mean, it generally, and they kind of fluctuate actually. You don't often get them together. You get one where the market is relatively stable. So you've got six bikes in say, and they're all basically the same. But one of them has you know, has a Fox Fork and XT.

And the others have like a Suntour or a LowSpec RockShox and Dior and you go, that one. But even then that can be tweaked because if that one comes from an online retailer, it's going to come in a box and you need some kind of knowledge to how to set up that Fox Fork and your Fox gears might, know, and your XT might be slightly out of adjustment because it got a knock in the box. Then that bike shouldn't win the test compared to the bike that's only got Dior and Revelation because actually

at that period, know, Rockshox was a lot easier to set up. And most importantly, they can get it from their local bike shop. And hopefully their local bike shop will go, yeah, you ignore the pressures on the side of the tire. You want this much in there. yeah, we'll sit you on it. We'll adjust the bars. You know, you can have the best bike in the world. And if you don't know what you're doing, you ride it with the forks around backwards. We've all seen that enough.

Let alone with 50 psi in the tires, because that's what it says. It still says, I think, on maxes sidewalls, like 35 psi minimum. It's like, dear Lord, you know, there are just little instances like that where we don't have ourselves. And then the other time is when there's a genuine shift in technology or the way a bike rides. And sometimes that flips it. And I remember when Mondraker forward geometry came out and being on a what mountain bike, bike of the year test.

And that bike was shocking value. I remember it was like, it was still two by, it was like two by SRAM X5. We don't think it, I think it, maybe it had to drop a post if it did, it was external. And all the other bikes were now by, when they were in a single ring, they were, you know, better spec on gears, better suspension. They had proper tires. think this had like Maxxis Ardents front and rear. And we think we were riding in finale in spring. So Maxxis Ardents on the front.

Guy Kesteven (42:56.033)
But thing was, we didn't die despite the fact that it an axis arm on the front because it had forward geometry. And you were just like, well, this is amazing. This is worth buying for the frame and then upgrade it over time. And I guess, although we weren't going to talk about e-bikes, we're seeing something of ignoring all the politics, whether it's right, wrong, or upsetting the squirrels. We're seeing that with Avinox now.

You know, but are we seeing a change? we now seeing Avinox bikes being a category on their own? You know, that's another thing. You know, are we seeing component categorization becoming the thought because more and more people are buying it on that basis. That's the first thing they're going for. And then they're subdividing into, well, I want, you know, this much travel or, you know, do they even care anymore? You know, has this completely flipped the switch again? You know, is that now taking us into a new age where we have to like

I don't think it is because hell, we'll try and make categories out of all of them because we can't help ourselves whether it's helpful or not.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (44:03.085)
You mentioned the Stumpjumper EVO and maybe this is the best example of it and I still have one in my basement 26 inch wheels and I'm 6'3 like 191 and I bought it back in the days in this frame size small because I had a very specific idea of how I wanted to ride and what I want to do with that bike because I wanted to put it on my shoulders carry it up a mountain and go down the most technical steepest crazy

hiking trail exposed as possible. And having an enduro bike, and Specialized calls it the enduro, so I thought if I take a longer enduro bike, I kill myself. Because it's faster, it enables me to go faster, easier.

While the Stumpjumper is more responsive, had a somewhat slack head angle and it's short enough to go around this crazy ass switchbacks. And you mentioned like people changing the parts on a bike. This bike, I played so much with it and I had like easy, fast rolling train tires on and then I even had downhill tires for it. And I swapped the wheels and I suddenly this bike

felt completely different because the tire responded so differently to the ground. And you had so much more grip and the suspension changed suddenly because it had so much more grip. I need to change the tire, not only the tire pressure, but the pressure and the suspension because I put much more force in it. So a bike which jumped every category suddenly became a mini, you remember mini downhill category?

Guy Kesteven (45:50.891)
Yeah, yeah. Well, four cross. There were some fantastic, like four cross trail bikes were brilliant for some things. mean, remember the blur four cross? That was a fantastic bike. That was like a nod on the wing bike. If you knew someone who was into that, you're like, I kind of want to go riding with you. You know, that was the kind of giveaway. You're like, they're probably going to get me hurt, but it's going to be fun until it happens kind of bike.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (45:51.149)
And also like this became a yeah mini enduro

Jens – Testpilot.bike (46:01.707)
Yeah, absolutely.

Guy Kesteven (46:20.556)
Whereas if you put someone on a 2015 Canyon, you'd probably have had a really nice trip birdwatching, and you'd have had very good value, and then have known where the mountain chalet was with the best beer. But it probably wouldn't have been a high adrenaline ride, compared to going out with someone on that bike. And again, ugh.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (46:42.551)
The question is, in the end, I mean, we're all riding bikes and there's a lot of controversy right now at the moment in Germany in some areas. They want to ban bikes from trails because they're saying there's too much traffic and with the pandemic boom and the e-bikes, more people using trails and there's more conflict because humans are humans, And the thing is that...

from as an outsider, while we can really pick it apart and talking about stump jumper jumping categories, beings maybe with lighter tires, somewhat of a touring marathon bikes and putting heavy tires on and also going down a downhill track, maybe not as fast as on a downhill bike, but you survive. And from an outside perspective, bikes, they're putting all in one box.

They're saying like this is the same people even with e-bikes, this is just the mountain bikers. They say, wait a minute, this is not the same people. And if I have a local spot, we started building like over 20 years back and I went there recently and one guy rode a specialized Essex trail from 2006 maybe. He hadn't even, he hadn't a chain on.

Guy Kesteven (47:59.628)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (48:03.853)
No derailleur no front chainring because if they were just sending insanely big 14 meter double jumps And you're like what what has this to do with people? grinding an ultra race for four or five hours Is it the same sport it has two wheels, but it's not the same sport. It's like comparing you said wing foiling to maybe

Guy Kesteven (48:10.688)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (48:33.335)
Just a chill boat ride.

Guy Kesteven (48:35.754)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because he's basically riding a balanced bike, isn't he? He's, he's, he has an extreme like a bike. But also I think going back to your problem with trail conflict is because we keep evolving bikes and we cut the way we evolve use of bikes. They've just got faster and faster and faster and faster. Even without talking about motors getting us up the hill faster. And then meaning we get more runs in downhill. So we get faster. You know, we, we may bike slacker and longer.

so they didn't go around corners unless we pulled the corners up in the edges and made them burns. And then we could go around those corners even faster so we knew them slacker and longer. So basically downhill mountain biking, as many people see it, basically that bobsleighing. It's just a bobsleigh run. You're just going down a tube. It's hot wheels. You're basically just making hot wheels tracks in the woods. again, gravel's quite popular amongst the senior folks like myself.

because, you know, compared to your e-bike, it's a very, very different experience. You know, if you've got an enduro bike, you don't ride your local dog walking woods anymore, because if you do go fast enough to enjoy it, you're going to kill somebody, potentially, or at least you're going to skid out in front of them. And you know you're in total control, but the difference when we were going down the hills in the late, you know, the late eighties on a Kuahara, we're like four finger brake levers that just did nothing but make it a kind of gasping noise. And we were going slower than hikers.

Yeah, we'd rake because even if we did cycle past them at any point, 100 meters later, we'd be repairing something because it would have been, you the rim would be crisped or the tire would have punctured or anything like that. You know, we weren't much of a confidant. I remember riding in Germany on press launches and stuff when you couldn't ride off road, know, certainly Austria, anything under two meters was severed. And, you know, again, it's just tricky, isn't it? We've again, it's a development thing, you know, and I think

I think the trouble is again, going back to BMX and stuff like that, did, I think they fleetingly tried to make BMX big business, but never beyond it really being a kid's bike. You know, it was massive when I was growing up. got it wrong. I was in the cyclist touring club, not in the BMXs, which is why I still can't do a wheelie or a jump properly. But you know, all the cool kids had a BMX, but then you moved out of that because then they said, you moved to mountain bike now.

Guy Kesteven (50:56.895)
But the people who stayed core in BMX, it never got big. And I think that's its strength because it's self-policed. yeah, I mean, it's quite, you know, it does have some surf Nazi situations, I'm sure. Whereas like, you you can't ride there and stuff like that, but it has a real strong culture and a real strong core. It's always had great media. It's always had great magazines because it's got that underground vibe. You know, it's like the classic old punk thing, you know, now a lot of gigs are very different.

Not least because if you think the people you always used to go with, if they hit the deck in a pit, you know, go, do they do picking up or do they need a defibrillator? Because we're all getting quite old now. But also, you know, it's a different experience now because there's more people who are coming into that kind of scene. And again, I think I can see mountain biking was this amazing cash cow for bike companies that, like I say, had been selling the same road bikes to the same people for so long.

And the ones who were quick to jump on it saw massive growth. know, whole new brands, a whole new, and it was on Seinfeld, was on, you know, Muddy Fox adverts, they were on catwalks, you know, people walking around the Brooklyn cycling cap on and lots of spanky, like Neon Micra. And it was fashionable, you know, it was part of the yuppie boom. You know, you had to have a mountain bike in your studio apartment, you know, with your Porsche outside and your red braces on.

You know, it was, it got massively blown out and we're constantly trying to make mountain biking popular. I'm not always, I mean, this is a terrible gatekeeper seem thing to say, but I'm not sure it's always the best thing for it. I two words, you know, world cup. And look at all, look at all the grumbling and you know, I don't know what the real figures are. More people getting into downhilling, are more people riding. But I do know that when I look on the continental website for

Jens – Testpilot.bike (52:31.169)
Yeah, does.

Guy Kesteven (52:50.717)
mountain bike tyres, it's a picture of a downhiller.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (52:54.669)
It's, maybe it's.

Guy Kesteven (52:55.731)
It's not, you know, they do a full range of tires, you know, from Dubnyetal right through to, you know, Argetal or whatever. But their image of a downhill is why my wife likes gravel biking because she doesn't, it doesn't, she doesn't feel like she's kind of, because she's on a mountain bike, she doesn't have to do a wheelie or a back flip or send something extreme because, because nobody expects it of her. Whereas even though it's obviously, you know, she feels that there's kind of pressure.

that she's not performing to the ability of the bike. And I think we've all felt that, you know, I don't, I rarely test bikes over 150 mil, because I know they could be ridden much better. You know, my opinion isn't that relevant. I mean, I'll still do them if they come up, you know, and it's just, think, really, we haven't touched category the whole, yeah, I know, bless her, you're trying to keep pulling it back to the whole category thing.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (53:43.405)
question.

Guy Kesteven (53:51.82)
But it's like taking a spaniel for a walk, having a podcast for me, and it's just always off in the bushes, just making a random rustling noise. So I apologize for that, but I think, I don't know. I mean, I think again, we're concentrated. The risk is we concentrate on so much on categories and changing bikes and improving them all the time is that we don't sell the actual act of mountain biking. And I think that's what gravel did really well. Cause there was sod all difference between gravel bikes really.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (54:22.359)
And there's no need to go crazy on them. you had Joanne Barelli when he rode a gravel bike down Dirt Merchant A-Line. Or was it a road bike? it's just like, shows it's always a rider. And then you can overbuild a trail bike to go more crazy or you can build up an enduro bike more lighter to go more toury. And yeah, we said it earlier. We choose a category and we bitch about

Guy Kesteven (54:23.038)
You know?

Jens – Testpilot.bike (54:53.301)
And it's maybe, we mentioned BMX and it's a more culture heavy sport and mountain biking on the one hand, it's a, in German we say it's a two sided sword or there are two sides to it. You try to be more open, you try to bring in more people which the industry likes because you sell more stuff.

But on the other hand, it brings in people that are not aware of the culture. They're not aware of what they're doing on trails, how you maintain trails, how you behave on trails. There's room, and I don't want to gatekeep people out of it, but there is...

Guy Kesteven (55:41.109)
But, see there it goes, but we were those people. When we started, we were those people. But it wasn't as easy to access then. It was terrifying. You just turned up at an agreed meeting point that you found out in the shop. Nobody had WhatsApp or an email or anything like that. And you got in, I it was basically an induction. It was exactly what your parents told you never to do.

meet some strange men, get in a van and go to some woods with them. And if you're lucky, you might make it back. was every parenting nightmare. And yet we did it, but that was not inclusive. It was not welcoming. And then we suddenly made purpose built trail centers where we had a panini at the end of the ride. It wasn't,

Jens – Testpilot.bike (56:15.149)
unskated.

Guy Kesteven (56:34.954)
You need to calm yourself there. So it's true, isn't it? But now we're like, and I'm really, really try the older and more creaky and leaky that I get. I really try not to become the people I used to hate. Which is, know, in our equipment, I guess it was the guys in chain gangs going, you to the back, you're not allowed on the front for another three years or until, you know, you've won your first time trial or something like that.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (56:37.687)
No, it's, it's, it's to the...

Guy Kesteven (57:05.002)
But the truth is, that's what made road riding safe. Cause some gnarly old stud like us with like legs like old banisters would go, like that. And now, you know, everyone comes off as whiffed and heads to the New Yorker 312 because they can do the watts, they can do the distance. And nobody gets, you know, half the people don't get behind the cut, around the cutoff point because 30 people crashed on an uphill within five kilometres of the start.

man. And again, you know, it's what we've seen so many times every time there's a new advance in technology, you know, the people with the pitchforks cameras, like suspension. God, they'll be charging. And if what's wrong with the two meters of suspension I've got in me arms. know, North Shore, they'll be falling on grandmothers out of the sky. you know, every time there's been an advance.

it's been, we've coped with it, we've sucked it up, we've moved on. And again, it was a funny idea, someone got really, really angry with me. I don't know if he trodden on his cat in the morning or something like that, but he was really annoyed because someone had sent me some of new E13 Sidekick wheels to test. He like, you shouldn't be testing these, these are for downhill. I'm like, yeah, well, kinda, but you know.

they're actually lighter than the previous sidekick. I said wheels there. Wasn't wheels, just the hubs. I haven't broken an embargo. But you know, they're lighter, so you can use them for trail now. was like, well, actually, if you think back, bars wider than, what, 60 centimeters were only for downhill, especially if they went up in the middle. You know, they were only for downhill, as were tires over two inches wide.

Remember the Panaracer Magic DH was 2.2. my god! know, weighed nearly 600 grams. Crazy! What is this gnarly madness? You know, they've got forks, suspension stems, or forks. no, Greg Herland-Paul just uses those because he's a downhill crazy. All of these things are now on cross-country bikes. shorter stems, longer bars, drop a post, all of it has been...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (59:03.339)
Heresy!

Guy Kesteven (59:27.452)
only for downhill. And yet it's all been accepted, but this guy was not having it, not having it at all. But you know, again, you know, he didn't want his category changing. And that's the thing about funny thing about, keep turning gravel. I'm trying to, you know, I'm trying to beat the analog here to get those clicks. When I started doing gravel races, you just met all the people you used to ride with like 20 years before. And they're still doing it. I'm probably on a bike that wasn't that different.

You know, they're still going out and riding big loops around the moors with a map on the front on a 1997 Marin Mount Vision, which is arguably a much better bike for doing it on than this kind of slightly raked out but not really enough early gravel bike that you've turned up on. But everyone just goes out, rides around the big loop, comes back, a cup of tea. But now the aerosock people and the wind tunnel watt counters have all got into gravel as well. I mean, you watch like the tracker and stuff like that.

Gravel racing is dangerous. Look at this crash I am having. I'm like, have you seen how far your hands are apart? You absolute chump. It's like, you're riding a loose gravel road. It's like, ah, I can fit 55 mil tires in my bike, even though it's only designed for 45 mil. You're like, yeah, good luck. When you hit a slightly piece of, a slightly matted piece of hog hair out there and your whole front wheel just jams solid. And it's just like, oh my lord.

You know, we can't help. I think that's it. We can't help ruining things, can we? As a species, know, the world, it would be a lot easier if we just go on, yeah, we can stand up on our hind legs and, you know, make fire, but we're not going to do out with it, to be honest. You know, let the lions still be in charge. They're probably going to do a better job. They'll be doing it for millions of years. Let them get on with it. We don't want to disturb the nature of things. You know, maybe we should stop there. You know, where do you think you should fish if you've stayed in the sea?

You know, what are the categorisation there? It's like, when you're sort of on land, but you haven't got fingers, you've just got kind of flippers, what do we call them? Are they fish? Are they mammals? don't know. They still lay eggs. What size fins have they got? know, what's the travel on their tail? You know, what's their categorisation back then? I don't know.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:01:47.767)
Yeah, I mean, it's...

Guy Kesteven (01:01:48.394)
It's an eternal problem, isn't it? It is at the end of the day, we're always, and I think with mountain biking, it's particularly hard because fundamentally we don't like being pigeonholed. We don't like being caught under a cup and put out in the garden in a neat car. Roadies love it. They bloody love it. You know, they'll do an Ironman and get a tattoo and they go, I'm an Ironman. And you know that because

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:01:51.116)
It is.

Guy Kesteven (01:02:18.1)
they've told you before you even got to see the tattoo because if you saw the tattoo you'd have gone and wouldn't have heard it. But you know they love that categorisation but mountain bikers never had. You know they grew from people building unsuitable bikes because they were the best they did and then taking them up beating them down the hill and they were like we can ride up so we'll put some touring gears on and it's just... I don't know.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:02:39.371)
It's maybe that the moment we're trying to categorize something, it loses the spark.

Guy Kesteven (01:02:47.369)
Boom. I haven't got a mic down, mic dropping. There we go. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. As soon as you, yeah. Basically it, innit? You know, whatever you pick.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:02:59.041)
In stark contrast to Road or BMX, maybe they already bring the pitchforks out comparing Road to BMX. But the thing is, mountain biking, as you put it, constantly keeps evolving from ladder bridges in the North Shore because out of the need of it, because the terrain, the trails wouldn't make for it because there's just too much stuff lying around. They need to go over it.

while other areas of the world shaped different categories. if you have a more gravelly road and you said the German tour category, which is like maybe due to the fact we have so much fire roads here and you just can go

Guy Kesteven (01:03:46.781)
Yeah, and at the time it was what you could ride. It was what you legally could ride. There's no point building bikes for stuff you're not allowed to ride, is there?

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:03:49.953)
Yeah. Yeah. then.

Yeah. I remember when we, when a friend of mine introduced me to more radical mountain biking in the nineties, there weren't any trails in that area I was living in. And there were stuff like pretty gnarly. And I considered it crazy jumping down a one meter drop of rocks and stuff while I was just bumping down fire roads on my

Peugeot, steel, hardtail, three by seven or six, whatever. And I felt crazy. Yeah. And then, and I figured there is more to it. And now the same hillside has trails on it, which are amazing. And you want to have, I wrote down with a hardtail and I wrote down with an Enduro bike and I enjoy it and enjoy the different category bikes and the different suspension amounts. but

Guy Kesteven (01:04:26.193)
Yeah, sitting bull for the win.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:04:49.973)
It's like you can't say there's just this one bike you have to use on this particular thing. And we see it also in bike parks. Back in the days, it was just all downhillers. And slowly, slowly, there was the first guy with an enduro bike and he had three by or even the two by already. And his chain was slapping around and it still still send it over everything. And then it was...

Wait a second, I need to get my crazy cat silent.

Guy Kesteven (01:05:26.249)
you

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:05:29.121)
So.

She loves to chill in my office. So I need to open the door. Come on.

Guy Kesteven (01:05:40.073)
So I'll just grab the bite and taste as well.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:05:48.109)
Now she's happy claiming her spot. Yeah. And I think in the, the bike parks, it's, it's so intense. Now you see rarely any double, double crown forks anymore. It's just a full on Enduro bike or Enduro race bikes. And even Enduro race is not a thing anymore. It's, it's just a mountain bike with a fairly slack head angle with a fairly amount of travel and you can do everything on

Guy Kesteven (01:06:18.792)
Yeah, but again, you know, we're trying to put Excel spreadsheets ahead of experience because you pick whatever bike you want to, if you know what you're doing. And I think maybe that's the crucial thing. If you know what you're doing and it's clearly communicated to you what each bike will do, then you can pick whatever bike you want, whatever experience you want to have on a given piece of terrain.

But the trouble is, if you don't have categories, it's really hard to explain it.

which is an industry, but it's not actually, I maybe it is an industry problem because people just walk into a motorbike shop and just go, I have no idea what I'm looking at. And then do they just walk out? Or do they just go, wow, you know, don't walk into a record shop and go, yeah, not really sure. I'll go and do golf instead.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:06:48.353)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:07:11.213)
Maybe people should stop looking for a checklist to pick up a sport. So this is the bike I need to ride. This is the sock height I need to run. This is the shoe I need to wear. This is the colors I need to run. And this is the trails I need to be on.

Guy Kesteven (01:07:30.505)
Yeah, but the thing is that's very comforting. You know, I think that's why someone like specializes. Yeah, because you can tickle the boxing ring. I mean, to borrow the phrase that Johnny Hart uses, you put on the costume, which I love, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, right, okay, I'll buy, I'll buy a Fox jersey because loads of people wear them. And if you go, I mean, I was specialized, sorry, I keep talking about them, but they're straight strengthies. They've, or you've always been able to go into a specialized shop and buy the specialized shoes, the specialized helmet, the specialized bike.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:07:33.963)
because you tick all the boxes?

Guy Kesteven (01:08:00.369)
Specialized socks a specialized pump and they've always been okay, know, you would have had a decent experience most of the time There's obviously been bits where they've come and go But so as an easy, you know, there's all the concept stores where it's like specialized high school musical You know, it's we're like, no, that's not that in biking But as an easy selling it's much more like an Apple store

I mean, if you went to an Apple store, there's just a bunch of keys lying on the floor and then some circuit boards and some screens. like, well, we can make you whatever computer you want. You're like, oh crikey, I don't think computing's for me. You know, certainly in my level of understanding, it's like, nah. You know, I'll leave that to the kids who I grew up with who were making computers that only commute with LEDs that flashed on and off. It's like driving an Alfa Romeo trying to work on a computer my mates made, but they're now working on the Hadron Collider.

So, that's, you know, that's not an easy retail experience for people, is it? You know, but whereas if you go and go, I want to ride cross country and they go, aha, you need this sausage skin and you need these carbon sold shoes and you did this helmet with no peak on it. Doesn't that make me a roadie? No, because you won't immediately fall over in these shoes. You fall over as soon as you go off road in them and try and walk in them. They go, right. Okay. Or, I'm a free rider.

You know, right. Okay. You want these baggy motocross pajamas and these sticky tennis shoes and a helmet that's this big. So you look like a wobble head and your neck hurts, but you know, and there's a dead easy buy in, you know, and that's, that's where categories like categorization, I guess does work. And maybe, maybe we're just looking at it as cynical old.

sods who've seen it all grow up and know it's actually all a bit of nonsense and it's just sales fluff rather than actually looking at it from the people who are coming into it and going my I mean we're seeing all this variety and all this versatility is brilliant you know the fact that but I mean the bottom line is motorbikes have never been better wherever you look now

Guy Kesteven (01:10:16.377)
Every category, mountain bikes have never been better. And part of that is because there's more of them. You know, they used to race on a weekend and your difference between racing XC, we used to have, I don't know if you had it in Germany, we used to have all three disciplines in the weekend. So you had like trials on Saturday morning, you had downhill on Saturday afternoon, and then you had the XC on the Sunday because more people did XC. The only difference was, was you let your tires down and took your bar ends off to do the downhill.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:10:33.645)
Yeah, yeah.

Guy Kesteven (01:10:45.816)
Yeah, nobody had suspension and some people were good at that. Some people were good at this and some, but we all had to go, you know, cause it was all on one bike and it was shit at all of them. If we're brutally honest, it was better than road bike. So it was brilliant, but that was the frame of reference, you know, and now every bike you look at, but we're also seeing those bikes not selling because there's so much confusion about how many there are. There's so many brands.

There's so much innovation, there's so many potential things to buy. And you know yourself, if you're trying to explain mountain biking to someone, you get three statements in or you get three questions in and they just glaze over most people. You know, they just want a simple answer. It's why publishers have always just pushed for a simple rating. Just like, I've written a dissertation of 7,000 words on all the nuances of this bike as perceived by me for different terrains and different people. It's like, yeah, but what is it out of 10?

That's all, you know, and even the, you know, even the manufacturers go, yeah, but is it 10 out of 10? Cause if it's not, it's not worth having the review. You know what I'm but I've really described that clever thing you did with the anti-squat and I liked the way you've invested a bit more in the grips than the common cell. It's like, yeah, but did it get a 10? Did it win the test? It's just like, just simplifies it massively. Cause that at the entry point and the explaining point is I guess what matters to the mass market. You know, we are, it's that.

Eternal thing about putting someone on the right bike and just selling it to them And I think we're not that side of the fence and so we'll maybe never understand it. I Know are we just stirring it all up ourselves too much? You know should it be called all by you know, it's test pilot, you know the basic issue here should it be like all mountain bikes are great I mean dirt with dirt magazine back in the day. It was brilliant to

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:12:32.844)
I mean...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:12:41.133)
Yeah, we tried.

Guy Kesteven (01:12:45.704)
Because a lot of times, genders go, yeah, well, it's not the best, it's, you know, does this, that, and the end. But at end of the day, you go bombing downhill on it, and bombing downhill's brilliant. So yeah, it's great. And look at the culture, then that reflected the culture of downhill at the time. None of them were great, but downhilling was great. So, yay.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:12:56.311)
We're trying to.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:13:05.393)
We're trying to find the greatness in every product. This is the idea.

Guy Kesteven (01:13:10.288)
No, we're not now. I'd argue it's the other way around. Every product is great and we're trying to show our experience and our expertise by going, but if they did this, it would be even better. And the truth is, it's really, really hard to buy a bad mountain bike compared to when we started, when it was almost impossible to buy a bike you could survive. All mountain bikes now are great.

but we get our kudos and we get our respect as testers, reviewers, or we get the, mean, then Clickbait has really accelerated this. You know, this bike is absolutely brilliant apart from this one thing. Or, you know, that, yeah, exactly. what's the thing? What's the thing? I need to know the thing so I can tell people I know the thing. And it's, know, that's what, unfortunately, that's what people click on.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:13:51.851)
and you will hear it later in the video.

Guy Kesteven (01:14:05.757)
You know, we don't buy, this bike is absolutely great. Because that's not very exciting, is it? It's not letting them into the secret club of the people who know. And it's not making you like the smart ass at the press launch because you go, but actually, I think you'll find. You know, that frame's actually lighter. Because you haven't quoted your seat collar in that weight and they have. So it doesn't matter. It's under two kilos and you want to race it. It's pretty much all good.

This would, you know, I don't even know that latest flurry of cross country bikes that came out, you know, Anthem, Epic, Canyon World Cup. It's got mad, you know, literally, I lost track because everyone's splitting the weights down so low. And then the day what really matters is what the bike weighs when you go and pick it up from the shop. And also whether that matters to you and maybe it doesn't, you know, but we've always loved grabbing numbers and we've always kind of loved picking holes in things because, you know,

We didn't get into the business of being critics, which is what we both are, by accepting everything and going, oh, well, that's nice. Don't need to dig into the detail on that. I'm perfectly fine. You didn't just take you and go, oh, well, I'll just take this bike up the mountain because I want to ride those mega janky trails. I'll massively overcomplicate the process and try every single tire and suspension change and everything I can and choose a bike that must have made you look like someone had let a...

Performing bear out the circus and put them on a kid's bike by the sound of if you're riding a small SX trail back then You know, but you love that. That's where you got the value from your mountain biking Was in doing all that tweaking and changing So, I guess if categories make it easier to at least get people, you know in the same way as when you sign up for a marathon You know, they go how fast are you gonna go then?

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:15:43.648)
Absolutely.

Guy Kesteven (01:15:58.076)
Have you done a marathon before? Maybe you should do like a 5K run before, you know, are you doing the three hour group? Are you in the four hour group? Are in the five hour group? I think we should probably inform your children right now that they're gonna inherit something in the next three hours, because you're not gonna make it past halfway point. You know, which category you in? And that makes for an easier, better experience for everyone who's doing the marathon. And I guess that's where good categorization works.

in the same way as good trail categorization works. You you don't want to get to the top of the hill and go, hey, it's all mountain biking. You know, that one's like a 14 meter sender that only the kid on the roundy balance bike that you described can do. Whereas that one's a lovely mellow trail with some really nice flowers on that third berm that you barely will notice a corner at the speed you're going. You know, that's when you need categorization. In the same ways,

You don't want the person turning up to go down the green trail having been sold a downhill bike, but you don't want the people yeeting off the double black to have been sold a gravel bike.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:17:06.175)
Maybe the conclusion for all of that is that people that entering the sport need to understand they're also entering somewhat of a culture and there is no checklist.

Guy Kesteven (01:17:19.623)
Yeah. And, as the people who, God forbid, seem to have managed to maneuver themselves, I think just by extinction of the rest, into a position where hopefully people are actually listening to this or we can speak to, you know, we can put our opinions out there. You know, maybe it's more on us to actually educate people and create that, you know, even if it's just we say it and then chap GPT picks it up. It's kind of our role as people who've seen all of this.

to communicate that better rather than me spending all my time working out the nuances of the new candy shop tune on a tour boy shock. Maybe it'd be much better if I just tried to make more generic content against categorizing stuff, put people on the right bikes or just do guide stuff. But then that's not very exciting, is it? There we go, we're gatekeeping again. We're just doing what suits us.

We're fundamentally not doing, you know, again, we're not digging, we're not digging and then riding, are we? That's the media equivalent of no dig, no ride. We're just like, yeah, we want to test all the fancy stuff and get really, really nerdy about that. We don't want to do the basics. Like, hey kids, don't leave gates open if they were shut when you got there. Or, hey kids, don't litter. Because we know if I put something up on trash-free trails, if I do my little bit and think, well, let's think about it.

I do an hour's trail building virtue signaling and I put it on Instagram and that encourages, you know, a thousand, maybe 10,000 people watching it, but a thousand of them spend an hour at their local trails. That's 10,000 hours of trail clearing. You know, that's, that's amazing. You know, I think you've got the maths there wrong, but you know what mean? A thousand hours and, uh, but it doesn't, it completely tanks.

You know, it doesn't matter to me because I've been doing this so long, the algorithm, I don't think it even knows I exist or it's put me in the same category as like deep sea creatures, like giant squids and fish with no eyes. You know, you people occasionally find me if they go deep enough in the internet. But if I was a proper, you know, YouTuber influencer and I was like, you know, this many views, this many views, this many views. my socially, you know, responsible post about behaving on trails.

Guy Kesteven (01:19:42.183)
or being nice to horses or picking up litter, something that goes, wallop, like that. If you've only been doing it a short while, your algorithm just took a major stem to the nut sack and you're not gonna go anywhere near that again. And that's always been the problem with, we can see it now, we always suspected it before, but we can see it now. But on the other hand, things like introduction to mountain biking.

are dead popular, but we leave them to like the mainstream media. We might write them, but they'll be like in Builder magazine or, you know, New York Times or something like that, or the Sunday Supplement. They'll be on the general media website. And we won't have done that. That general media website might have come to us and asked us to do that. Whereas if you look at something like the skiing industry, they're very, very proactive in like growing the culture.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:20:34.796)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Kesteven (01:20:37.639)
because they know if they grow the culture, then people will then book a Nielsen holiday or they'll buy Salomon skis or something like that because they've really concentrated on creating that culture. And if you look at the media for this, this is actually a point I stole off Hannah from Singletrack when she did a presentation a while ago, saw. If you just Google mountain biking, nearly all the mountain biking is like, yeah, there's a bit about racing, but it's all like Friday fails, horrific injury.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:21:03.661)
Mm.

Guy Kesteven (01:21:05.607)
crash and burn, like, my God, I can't believe I did this. Whereas you look up, know, look up skiing on the internet, it's all beautifully, you know, it's all very nicely curated content and perfect nuclear families enjoying an apparel spritz. You know, they're not in hospital. You know, it's not x-ray shots. It's really nice appraised ski shots. Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:21:06.669)
Uhhh...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:21:22.541)
They're not the crazy bunch. They're not the crazy ones. biking, it feeds from the gnar somewhat and people get hurt. yeah, maybe this is a whole different topic about Friday fails and everything. Just the image we are shaping and the big players out there, even Red Bull, the one that's going non-endemic, like in the mainstream media is just the biggest crashes of Red Bull and people think we are lunatics.

Guy Kesteven (01:21:38.097)
Yeah, I think it is.

Guy Kesteven (01:21:51.303)
Yep. Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:21:52.525)
And there's so much easy writing out there. Not everybody needs to do a teeter totter in the North Shore or somewhere deep in the woods getting eaten by bears and cougars. But it's somewhat the image, the industry, this painting. as you put it, we use this kind of selling point.

Guy Kesteven (01:21:57.115)
Yeah, exactly.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:22:21.066)
And it needs to be more gnarly for a better story, it's recreational sport is not something that sounds cool or sell stuff because it's the same thing that people buy an SUV over a regular minivan because they think it's a better image car and they pay a premium on it.

Guy Kesteven (01:22:40.486)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, usually is great, but people will always put chocolate sprinkles on it. So they get to sell it more. Well, it's not so great anymore, is it? They put a bit more sugar in it. And it's the same, you know, I literally got I remember writing for a make by the brief time I spent editing a magazine. Remember the maximum amount about it didn't last long. Someone just grabbing his very whole meal.

because we still had maps in there and we talked about like map events and stuff like that. Because that's the riding I was doing, you know, it wasn't North Shore and all that stuff, but, you know, we didn't get the cover images or if we did, they certainly didn't relate to the rest of the magazine. But again, you know, it goes back to the point and that's why gravel I think has been really popular because the image is much more acceptable. You know, you go, oh, what's gravel riding then, dear? Oh, you know, whether you're the wife of a 50 year old bloke or...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:23:28.878)
Get out, get out in the, get out there.

Guy Kesteven (01:23:33.966)
You know, you're someone trying to get your partner into it or, you know, you're a parent. know, and your kid's going, I want to do gravel. And I go, what does, you know, I'll just have a quick, what does TAP GPT say about gravel? I was like, it encourages, you know, going out into the outdoors with friends and experiencing nature. that sounds fairly healthy and lovely. It's like, I look at mountain, I think they did what? shit. Right. Okay. Right.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:23:59.672)
descending of cliffs. They're getting hurt.

Guy Kesteven (01:24:03.494)
and they cost how much? And they break them all the time! Well that doesn't sound good. Yeah, we don't help ourselves, do we? No. Yeah. But... Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:24:13.56)
No answer on this one. So we have no answer.

Guy Kesteven (01:24:18.279)
What are doing? Mountain biking's great. We're just shit at being categorized. Maybe that's why it's great. I don't know. But yeah, I think we could all do more as the Gandalfs of the group to try and educate. Because I think, you know, again, there's that real easy trap to fall into where you go, oh, these people are just stupid. You know, they're not respectful of the environment.

But they haven't been taught. You you're saying you've mentioned, you know, the people who've come in during the pandemic. And the people who aren't just aren't used to being outside, it's not their fault. It's not their fault they're behaving like that. And we were all there at some point, but it was a much lower level and it was easier to manage. Just proportionally we were much smaller. And now you've got things like the fact that bikes are very, very easy. mean, bikes were their own gatekeeping thing.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:24:56.545)
And you can't blame them.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:25:13.977)
Yes.

Guy Kesteven (01:25:14.176)
They were shaped like a gate and they were a very, very powerful gate to stop you actually getting over into the enjoyment of mountain biking. They were pretty well locked when it comes to actually enjoying mountain biking. And now they're great. They're really easy to ride fast. You can go to bike park and someone takes you up the hill and just goes, go. And actually you'll probably get to the bottom most times. The trouble is you'll be never going so fast. When you don't get to the bottom, you're going to have a really big off.

It's not going to be a little walking pace wobble anymore. It's a proper, you know, you're going medieval siege engine scale kind of disasters. And again, e-bikes are now spilling that up onto the hills.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:25:56.322)
Yeah, it's a cultural question, I guess. again, you can't blame people for buying bikes and having an easy time accessing all the trails and not knowing how to use the product or being out of their comfort zone. It's as, yeah, we as media or part of the mountain bike culture should have a more educational voice.

Even though I don't want to be the teacher. This is maybe also like a cultural mountain bike thing because you don't want to say people besides like consider your local jump spot. And then you have like this, this, master digger and he's like any kid coming there, standing on jumps, like they will, they will have a blast on them. Like you're not coming here anymore when you're standing on jumps. You're no dig, no ride. You, you

Guy Kesteven (01:26:36.229)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:26:56.046)
Don't litter. We were putting like tarps over the jumps before we and it's just like super Nazi. It's there's gatekeeping as hell and you need to have the culture to be accepted in these kind of spots. And while mountain biking got more open, got more accessible and open for people who

As said, you can't blame them for not knowing the rules, but it also makes for more problems. So I guess we can close this whole thing, but not finding an answer, but maybe advocate towards people trying to be reasonable.

Guy Kesteven (01:27:43.214)
Yeah. yeah, I guess. I mean, yeah, I think, I mean, the whole idea was to talk about categories. And I still think categories are relevant because they help people get into the sport. But I think we make categories far more important than they actually are. I think as much as it's important that people walk out of a bike shop or start riding with the correct bike, it's more important that they have a better understanding.

of how to enjoy mountain biking as a whole. And they're educated in not just what bike will suit them, but also in how they should ride that bike maybe and what their expectations should be. But that's always inevitably gonna be a learning process. can't, you can't just look at someone and know how they're gonna ride, I guess. Yeah.

I feel like we fizzled out a bit on this. need, we need, we do need a... But yeah. mean, come on. So I dropped the ultimate cliche. It's all about head space, not head angles. That's the one I save generally for when the conversation's taking a dip, when I try and sound clever. Because ultimately it is. Because at the end of the day, you you say that about it being really Nazi, about telling people not to stand on top of the jump or, you know, not to cover it up in winter, but that's...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:28:46.232)
We've rambled, but maybe it's it.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:29:00.022)
I it's so...

Guy Kesteven (01:29:11.295)
that jump survives and it's how people avoid getting really injured. So maybe there is a balance of that, maybe we need some of that, but again it's a balance. There are areas where that is the correct approach and that needs to happen to stop people hurting themselves and to keep that side of it alive and that mountain biking as a whole, in the same way as some trails, are by definition not inclusive and it's dangerous to try and make it too inclusive.

And categorization, whether it's rider, whether it's trail, whether it's bike, is just a way of making sure people have the best experience.

And that is part, and that is inevitably part of the education.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:29:56.351)
sounding boring but maybe that's it.

Guy Kesteven (01:29:59.353)
Yeah, we are becoming those people we used to hate, aren't we?

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:30:02.761)
Maybe we should stop the recording now before we burying a grave for ourselves. Digging a grave for ourselves.

Guy Kesteven (01:30:13.079)
Yeah, but it's great though, isn't it? It's great that we are still, know, that mountain biking has evolved enough that we are still having these conversations and it's still exciting and it's still interesting, you know, and it's still, it's still, it is bringing in new people and it's bringing in new technology and bikes are getting better than ever and there's more variety of trails and mountain biking is far more things than it can be far more things, I guess, than it ever was. You know, it can be run page or it can be a roll through the blue bells.

You know, that's good. That we can all agree on.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:30:45.23)
Thank you so much. That's a good one. Thank you.

Guy Kesteven (01:30:49.913)
Gents, as always, absolute pleasure to talk. Thanks very much. And cheers to everyone who's managed to hang in there this long.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:30:51.428)
It was a pleasure.