Do we even notice anymore? Deep in our own MTB bubble, we’ve drifted a long way from reality. Bikes priced like cars. Tech you need a manual to decode. An injury risk that comes with its own helicopter. And a scene too cool to see any of it as a problem, celebrating it instead. Is mountain biking becoming a hobby that puts people off?

To read this properly, take a big step back. Step out of the small slice of the world that’s probably become reality for anyone who reads our articles: the quirky little microcosm of mountain biking. Step away from the Instagram feed that bombards you, without pause, with two wheels, knobby tires, and whirring freewheels. Step away from the idea that a good day is inseparable from dirt on your face, adrenaline in your blood, and talk about suspension fine-tuning and upgrade plans.

Because that logic applies to only a few of us, and it puts off everyone else, the people watching mountain biking from the outside, undecided whether to try it or give it a miss. As it’s developed over the past few years, the sport has drifted further and further from the very people it should be reaching. It’s becoming genuinely off-putting, and it’s putting its own accessibility at risk, especially for the young riders meant to keep it alive… right?!

To test that hypothesis, we spoke to people it actually touches. To industry figures like Christoph Listmann from Canyon, who is determined that mountain biking shouldn’t shrink into a niche sport. To bike shop owners like Pablo Moreno, who see firsthand what potential customers really want when they walk through the door. To Jasper Jauch, who works with the next generation of riders and knows on the trail exactly what it takes for a young person to find their way in. And to the people already shut out: outdoor sports enthusiasts who love what they do but deliberately keep clear of mountain biking. What’s gone wrong with our community? How does it heal? Or is everything actually fine?

As Expensive as a Car

The MTB enthusiast in us bristles: “What nonsense!” But deep down we know better. Getting into mountain biking costs far more than most sports. Top-end bikes passed five figures long ago, even models without an electric motor. A new Dacia costs less today than some of those two-wheeled treasures rolling past us on the trail and casually leaning against a pub fence a couple of hours later.

Christoph Listmann, General Manager of Mountain at Canyon, agrees that certain segments and competitors have recently “over-tightened the price screw.” Yes, rising prices have perfectly plausible reasons, such as inflation, rising manufacturing costs, and volatile energy prices in a strained global economy. But part of the reason it’s come to feel completely normal to pay €5,000 for a mid-range mountain bike lies in the “always more” attitude we all seem to have fallen for.

Development until Overshoot

Science offers a simple explanation for this: Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. The Harvard professor laid bare a paradoxical trap that industries – the mountain bike industry among them – almost inevitably fall into at some point. The big brands reliably deliver what riders crave: technical progress, new features, enhanced performance, exclusivity… high-end, in other words, the stuff of our quiet daydreams. And because high-end products carry fatter margins, manufacturers and retailers are quite happy with this “always more” approach. We’re guilty of it too, often showcasing new bikes with top-tier specs rather than mid-range components.

As a result, our own expectations and demands cheerfully spiral ever higher, to the point where products are effectively over-engineered for the target audience: the classic “overshoot” scenario described by Christensen. The typical result is that new players enter the market with products that offer a deliberate simplification, yet are still “good enough” for the vast majority of users. It is only through such disruption from below that the overshoot bubble is burst, a previously unrecognized need for simplicity is met, and prices become attractive again.

As long as ambitious marketing departments and enthusiastic customers keep driving the development of ever-more-sophisticated products for our mountain bikes, the spiral will continue to spin merrily toward overshoot. But the time will come when new, more affordable alternatives push their way onto the market. Not ones that are “even better,” but simply “good enough”, ensuring a better user experience and thus ultimately more appealing to the casual rider without mechanical expertise. Fun factor on the trail with a bike like that? For the vast majority of us, just as great as with a top-of-the-line model! What’s more, the lower prices could make mountain biking more inviting in terms of cost, drawing in those who are currently turning away in dismay at the steep prices, and rather go jogging instead.

Are they even allowed to do that?

In resorts like Leogang, Schladming and others, open to skiers in the winter and mountain bikers in the summer, the situation is clear: The lifts sell tickets, the sports shops provide spare parts, the mountain huts serve food, and the hotels or campgrounds offer places to stay. The cash registers are ringing, and everyone’s on the same page. But outside the major centers, the picture of mountain bike infrastructure quickly takes a turn for the worse. In the local city forest, on the nearest hill, or at the dirt park next to the soccer field, there’s usually no money to be made from offerings for mountain bikers. Anyone who even maintains the trails here mostly does so as a volunteer, with a great deal of idealism and no shortage of legal obstacles.

I’m extremely afraid that something will happen on the trails and I’ll end up being personally liable for it.
– Jasper Jauch

Even more challenging: from an insurance standpoint, you can quickly get your fingers burned if others get injured on a trail you’ve created. Added to this are conflicts over usage rights between mountain bikers and other interest groups such as hikers, local residents, hunters, and conservationists, especially in Germany and its neighboring countries. This quickly brings local politicians into the picture, who, in the best-case scenario, find solutions, but in the worst-case scenario simply impose strict rules and bans. As a result, many attractive MTB regions in Europe are characterized by a confusing set of regulations and the constantly simmering question: is biking even allowed here? This friction brings enormous disadvantages for mountain biking, which Jasper Jauch, for example, feels firsthand. The former racer now reaches many young MTB enthusiasts through his social media channels and is personally involved in maintaining the local dirt park in his hometown – constantly in contact with local authorities, critics, and his own concern that he might one day be held personally liable for an accident.

Yet Jasper also knows it can be done. Take BIKELÄND-Eberbach, near Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg. Instead of the dreaded two-metre rule, dialogue won out there. What was once a conflict zone for mountain bikers has become a win for everyone, through legalisation, signage, and a smart separation of hikers and riders. Treuchtlingen tells a similar story: a small DIY project grew into an official, publicly accessible MTB facility with beginner trails, and has since even gained a small T-bar lift.

I’ve noticed that people just don’t feel like creating legal trails anymore. They just build them faster than you can destroy them.
– Jasper Jauch

But the reality in many MTB areas currently looks quite different. Recently, the once-flagship Blindsee Trail project in the Tyrolean Zugspitze area has come under fire from critics – and, despite its success in drawing tourists and a huge outcry from mountain bikers, it’s set to close in 2027. The closure is not due to a lack of success. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The growing number of visitors and the resulting conflicts between hikers and mountain bikers on the shared trail are considered the main reasons behind the decision. If mountain biking is to stay accessible, and if we want to open the door to curious kids and beginners, we need low-barrier options. But where the sport is seen as undesirable or outright banned, no new trails will be created, no community-building events will take place, and an entire movement will be nipped in the bud.

Props Instead of Pros

How do committed riders come across to outsiders? What impression do you form of “the MTB scene” when you’re still unsure whether you want to dive deeper into this little world yourself? The answer, of course, is as varied as the people we’re talking about. Every self-proclaimed MTB crew has a different vibe from the next.

“You can come along, but we ride fast.”

Is it all KOM chases and one-upmanship out there, where nothing but bikes dripping in Kashima Factory bling gets a second look? A scene where everyone’s out for blood is hardly the place to stumble on the generous, unifying side that mountain biking undoubtedly has.

Some people try to set themselves apart from others instead of working together to strengthen the sport.
– Jasper Jauch

When style etiquette comes into play and we start telling each other which clothes and brands are cool or totally out of fashion, we quickly shut the door on newcomers. Who wants to feel sized up from the get-go when all they’re trying to do is learn and find their way into the sport? On a small scale, it’s in our own hands, ours and our riding mates’, to decide whether mountain biking feels welcoming. And in plenty of cases, happily, it long since has been.

“Great try!”

Finding your place in a new hobby also means feeling accepted by others while you work through your own learning curve. We do ten times more for a healthy mountain biking community by giving someone credit for a gutsy attempt in a tricky section than by casually showing them how it’s done once and then racing off down the trail. Opening the door for others can be so easy. It starts with every single ride, and with ourselves.

What do others say, the ones who are physically active but deliberately steer clear of mountain biking? Is it really the too-“cool-for-school” scene that’s holding them back? We spoke with two of them: Robert Lehmann-Dolle competed as a speed skater at the Olympic Games. Today, he enjoys pushing himself on his road bike and gravel bike, for instance in the self-supported Three Peaks Bike Race from Vienna to Barcelona. Dominic Schmuck used to be a biathlete and also comes from the world of international competitive sports. His home region Chiemgau offers plenty of options for mountain biking. And yet, even he prefers narrow tires to trails. Why? And does that have anything to do with the community?

I think you can have a lot of fun in the MTB community – just being outdoors, trying stuff out, working on something together, and watching others. A community where people are laid-back with each other and focus less on performance and more on having fun.
– Robert Lehmann-Dolle

I have a positive impression of the mountain biking community. People with style, laid-back attitudes, and positive vibes.
– Dominic Schmuck

So at least Robert and Dominic acknowledge that the MTB world definitely has a certain appeal. Their reasons for staying away from it aren’t based on any specific personal experiences they’ve had. What makes them avoid the trails is something much bigger.

The Poison of Friday Fails

Individual, personal encounters with the MTB scene are one thing. Get close enough and, in many cases, you feel the wonderful riding community we ourselves celebrate so much. The other side of the coin, however, is the overall picture painted by the internet and social media. This is what people outside the scene encounter much earlier, and in some respects, it’s devastating.

Let’s take a look at reality through the eyes of someone just starting to weigh up whether to buy a trail bike. What do they see? There’s hardly any other sport that celebrates failure more than mountain biking. And yes, that’s exactly what we called for earlier when we talked about giving props for good attempts. But everything has its healthy limits, and mountain biking crosses them again and again, especially in the media. The algorithms of our favorite time-wasters reliably flood our feeds with the most extreme stuff the sport has to offer: the jumps, the tricks, the hucks, all pushed to the absolute limit. Underneath it runs a bizarre glorification of danger, as if serious risk were something you inevitably take on the moment you hit the trail.

For me, mountain biking on the trail means going crazy, switching off the brain, and just doing it. Personally, it puts me off. But I find it fascinating that others do it.
– Robert Lehmann-Dolle

Sure, when we watch a pro like Gee Atherton take a hard fall during a film shoot in Wales and end up with a list of injuries as long as the credits, it seems far removed from our own reality. The nasty injuries sustained by Adolf Silva and Emil Johansson at the 2026 Red Bull Rampage also fall into the category of “Only pros do that.” And they’ve grown into the world of mountain biking through a lot of hard work and doing tons of push-ups. But even the stunts performed by ordinary people are getting more and more extreme – and they are catching on.

Do you know, for example, Egor Lebedinskiy, aka mi24real? Of course not. But when this teenager, kitted out in nothing more than a half-shell helmet and a T-shirt hanging off his skinny arms, sends his dirt jumper over a freeride gap jump that’s completely oversized for his bike, with no prospect of a clean landing, close to a million people watch and roar him on. That jump could have cost him a great deal more than a bike. And yet the kid somehow rides it out, banks his fifteen minutes and his million views, and the comments run more or less as one: “Balls of steel, let’s gooo.”

True, most of us have probably landed in A&E at least once with a bike-related injury. But is this really the side of the sport we most want to broadcast? How did it become normal to celebrate blind risk-taking like this? And who does this really inspire to hop on a mountain bike themselves?

The risk of injury really plays a big role for me, and it puts me off.
– Dominic Schmuck

A symbol of this sad trend is Pinkbike’s “Friday Fails” series. The content is nothing but crashes, from the bizarre to the downright nasty, crashes the riders submit themselves at that. The odd “rider was okay” tacked onto the end of a clip doesn’t change what’s really going on: one person’s misfortune served up as crude entertainment for everyone else, at the expense of the sport’s public image, which duly shuts its doors on anyone not actively in the market for a hobby that’ll sign them off work.

Unnecessarily complex and therefore overpriced equipment, constant conflicts over the mere question of whether it’s even allowed, and the glorification of risk and injury online – all of which are terrible conditions for mountain biking to gain much traction in the future. Or are they? Our pessimistic hypothesis seems almost confirmed: MTB is probably going down the drain. Sad, but true… Really true? Yet a voice is rising up and strongly disagreeing. And it belongs to someone almost everyone in the scene knows: Seb Kemp spoke…

It must be tough!

You might know this guy from his role at Santa Cruz. In this interview, however, he’s speaking explicitly not on behalf of a brand, but as a private mountain biker with a glowing passion for this way of life on two knobby tires. And his words burn like hot brake rotors:

So what’s really right? Should we go all out to enthusiastically open the door to mountain biking for as many people out there as possible? In other words, should we recommend simpler bikes with more affordable parts instead of chasing high-end fantasies? Should we seek dialogue with municipal and local decision-makers to foster harmony on the trails, rather than just building them? And talk less about crashes and more about small successes and celebrate them?

Or should we simply accept that the scene has only limited control over its own future anyway? Because its daring pitch draws the risk-takers and repels the safety-conscious, and always will? Because the true essence of mountain biking can’t be made accessible at all, but has to stay harsh to be real? Because it’s precisely the rough edges, the jagged corners and the sheer absurdities that make this little world such a gloriously vast one for a handful of eccentrics, ourselves included?

The best answer is probably a bit of both. Less flashy kits would, in the end, make the vast majority of riders happier than high-tech components they’re using wrong. It helps, too, to cast a critical eye over our own feeds and think twice before liking the next crash video. And a bit of respect in our dealings with other people out on the trails never goes amiss. As for the rest, Seb Kemp is probably spot on: mountain biking isn’t just allowed to be tough, and even a little dangerous, it has to be. That’s what makes it thrilling. Now and in the future.

Is mountain biking off-putting? A little, yes. But if we can find the nerve to go for less bling in our kit and more camaraderie on the trail, we open the door to everyone looking in from the outside, without betraying that wonderfully rugged core. Strip out the rough edges entirely and it wouldn’t be real. Keep it challenging, keep it honest, but at the same time say: “Come along. We’ll wait for you.”

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Words: Moritz Geisreiter Photos: Peter Walker, diverse