Traditionally, only men were invited to the scariest and most lucrative event in mountain biking. This year, women shared equally in the adrenaline and the prizes.
The women were competing, finally, at Red Bull Rampage, considered the biggest and gnarliest mountain bike competition in the world. At the bottom, Katie Holden was overcome by the moment.
For years, Holden, a 39-year-old mountain bike athlete and advocate, had led the push for this gender barrier to fall. Now it had, in the Utah desert near Zion National Park.
“Women are in Rampage now,” she said, soaking in those words and smiling through tears. “This is all we wanted.”
Rampage, a chart-your-own course “freeride” event, began in 2001. But it was only for men, and it stayed that way as it grew into the sport’s most feared, most anticipated spectacle. Last week, it became the latest athletic setting where women finally had equal access and pay.
To know why this matters, simply follow the dusty trails of blood, sweat and tears that tumbled down the craggy, crumbling sandstone slopes. Rampage can be both exhilarating and horrifying – including for viewers – as riders fly down steep drops and over big jumps while carving turns at the edges of cliffs.
The first down was Robin Goomes, a 28-year-old from New Zealand. The day before, she had wondered aloud whether the reluctance to include women at Rampage was rooted in the audaciousness of it all – “It’s actually pretty psycho when you look at it,” she said – and in a testosterone-fuelled notion that the presence of women would diminish the brashness and make Rampage “look less gnarly”.
If Goomes felt the weight of the moment, she did not show it. She navigated a series of rocky, technical sections and a couple of gut-sinking drops. She performed two backflips off jumps. She reached the finish, leaped off her bike and was given the highest score of the event. Her prize was US$100,000 ($165,000), the same as for the men who competed two days later and bigger than any other payout in the sport.
Then came Casey Brown, a 33-year-old Canadian, maybe the best known of the growing freeride mountain bike sorority. She spent years fighting for a spot at Rampage, for herself and others, and would finish third in the competition.
“Women are tough as nails,” she said. “It’s a shame that most of the time we want to do something, we have to ask men for permission.”
Soon came Georgia Astle, 27, another Canadian. She navigated a steep gully that she and others christened the “Chuterus,” though race officials publicly labelled it “Chutes ‘R’ Us”. It was a tight, downhill passage leading to a tricky exit and toward even more frightening obstacles.
Astle beamed when she reached the bottom of her run, finishing in second place. “We have kicked the door down,” she said.
Then she texted her mother to tell her that she was OK.
In the end, all of them were – even Cami Nogueira of Argentina, who dropped out of the contest after a nasty face-plant in practice left her with a concussion, a broken nose and a dozen stitches that marched up from her lip.
Still, she smiled and hugged each of her friends as they reached the bottom – which is to say, when women finally got to the top.
Crash test dummies
In professional mountain biking, Rampage is different. Part of it is the setting, on the eroding slopes near Gooseberry Mesa, a massive butte and mountain biking mecca that rises high over the desert floor.
Part of it is the unique format. Each year, a small number of invited competitors are given a starting point and a finish line, separated by hundreds of vertical feet of cliffs, gullies and unforgiving sun-baked terrain. Using imagination, shovels and a couple of good friends – there are no chairlifts or rides to the top, so even the bikes must be carried up the mountain – contestants spend a week building trails, berms and jumps.
Then they serve as their own crash test dummies for a few days. How fast do I need to hit that jump to cross the canyon and reach the landing? After that free-fall drop, can I slow down enough to keep from flying off a cliff?
The goal is to impress a panel of five judges with creativity, daring and fluidity. It is also to survive. No one has died at Rampage, but at least one competitor has been paralysed in a fall. Helicopters are on hand to fly the injured to an area hospital, if needed. And they have been needed, including once during the men’s competition last Saturday. (Defending champion Cam Zink sustained six broken ribs and a collapsed lung.)
Danger did not stop women from wanting to participate. Just the opposite.
Women have been part of mountain biking since the beginning, of course. And as various events and circuits have expanded around the world, including at the Olympics, they have been welcomed as equals. But Rampage was an invitational event, and it was not inviting women.
The question, growing louder in recent years as gender barriers fell in other sports, was just who or what organisers were trying to protect. At best, the event was merely out of step with changing cultural norms and the rise of women’s sports.
A parallel might be seen in surfing, where the best female surfers are now competing on the world’s most dangerous waves, like Pipeline in Hawaii and Teahupo’o in Tahiti.
“I always thought that this had to happen eventually,” Brown said of women at Rampage. “Once you saw the other sports get the memo, there was no way around it.”
Todd Barber was a founder of Rampage in 2001 and still oversees it in partnership with Red Bull. Why did it take until 2024 to invite women?
“I don’t think we were ever holding out,” Barber said. “It just takes time. We needed to make sure it was done right.”
Barber said that the delay was a matter of logistics, not sexism. Women and men would need two separate “venues,” as he called the vast terrains where athletes built trails and rode and which often changed from year to year. More space and athletes would mean more infrastructure, more money, more staffers. It would mean acquiring proper permits (the event takes place on public land) and figuring out how to televise and stream it all.
“There’s not a Rampage site around every corner,” Barber said. “This has taken a lot of work to figure out.”
Holden, then a mountain bike racer, first came to Rampage in 2010. “When I saw it the first time,” she said, “I thought, ‘This is so crazy, and I want to be a part of it.’”
She played the long game. She worked as a course “digger” at Rampage and took on odd jobs there, looking for ways to break through the barriers. In 2019, she helped create Red Bull Formation, a sort of on-site incubator for women. The idea was to give elite female riders a training camp experience in the same red dirt that the men rode on.
The event seemed to move toward inclusion in Rampage until 2023, when Holden and others were told, without explanation, that Formation was cancelled and that women would not take part in that year’s Rampage. Hopes were crushed. Criticism was sharp.
Holden and others persisted, backed by public pressure. They resisted calls to simply create a similar, separate contest, wanting the eyeballs and respect that came only with Rampage. They formally asked for inclusion and equal prize money.
Long story short: they got it this year.
“It’s 2024,” Astle said. “And the stigma of girls doing the most extreme sports is a thing of the past.”
Claire Buchar, 46, was one of the countless mountain bike athletes whose career came along too early for her to ride in Rampage. But she was invited this year as a “shadow” judge as the event integrated women into its structure.
“It’s bittersweet because we’re just a bit behind,” Buchar said. “The guys have had 20 years to progress to this level. This is Year One for us. But it’s rewarding because it’s just the beginning, and there’s so much potential.”
She watched women like Brown launch themselves down the mountain – “bossing it,” she said – the day before the contest.
“I think this will open a lot of people’s eyes and shut a lot of people’s mouths,” Buchar said.
‘A roller coaster of fear’
Fans began arriving before sunrise. They took four-wheel-drive shuttles, rode bikes or hiked a few miles to a temporary camp of tents, trailers and portable toilets.
From the finish area, they could squint into the rising sun and spot the wooden starting gate, about 182 metres above. They could see faint trails, berms and landing ramps. The mountainside was a dot-to-dot puzzle, the picture hard to envision until someone linked the pieces together, top to bottom.
Some of what makes Rampage unique is also a strong argument for inclusion.
Each athlete builds her own course (rules allowed for a three-person crew of “diggers”), meaning she could create as much risk as she was willing to endure.
“It’s a roller coaster of fear,” Goomes said the day before the contest. She laughed. “For sure it’s the scariest stuff I’ve ever done.”
On contest day, after a two-hour delay for wind, she went first.
“Red Bull Rampage, you just witnessed history!” a public-address announcer shouted as Goomes completed her run.
Every female competitor dropped into the void, into the embrace of fans. It was just what the women had wanted all along: to be included, to be tested, to be supported.
In the crowd was Michelle Parker, a professional freeskier. She carves her way down mountains in snow, much the way that the bikers were doing in the dirt. Freeskiing, she said, was a few years ahead on the gender curve. She wanted to show support as mountain bikers had their moment.
“I think a lot of men didn’t think women were ready,” Parker said. “But who are they to say we’re not ready?”
It was an echo of the questions raised by Brown, maybe the most famous of female mountain bikers. Why are men the gatekeepers? It was suggested that younger generations of girls could now, finally, imagine themselves at Rampage, but Brown quickly expanded the intended audience.
“It’s also for all the boys and men out there,” she said. “It’s one more thing for them to give us a bit more respect.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: John Branch
Photographs by: Alex Goodlett
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
