Mountain Biking: Leisure, Extreme Sport, and Olympic Discipline

Well, with a good mountain bike you can do all of them. The mountain bike action is genuine excitement, but at the same time, it has an inherent degree of hazard and requires very good technical and physical resources.

A trip on the mountain or along the difficult country roads, using the mountain bikes, is always an exciting and out-of-the-ordinary experience. Besides the wonderful natural views lying all around you, there is also to consider the feelings stirred by the mountain bike trips, along sinuous and abrupt trails and wood paths full of twists and turns, where man must control himself and have a total control of his MTB.

This sort of off-road expeditions and mountain bike contests are more and more appreciated nowadays, when the mountain bike sport has more and more supporters and practitioners. It is not easy to engage yourself in such mountain bike off-road races, but once you hit the road and felt the “taste” of the mountain bike excitement, there is only you and your MTB. And that is all it matters. Even if you decide to participate to a mountain bike race, you should always experience the ultimate pleasure of the trip. Otherwise, you will never be able to win. Just like any other sportive discipline, mountain biking requires skills, a lot of training, determination and enthusiasm.

A mountain bike walk in the woods should not be confounded with an extreme sport. In the end, any sport might become extreme; it depends on how far you decide to push your own limits and how badly you feel the need of adrenaline and action. Also, swimming may become an extremely dangerous sport if one chooses to share the swimming pool with a shark. However, we should always bear in minds the fact that the line between pushing the limits carefully and securely, and pushing them recklessly, irresponsibly is so fragile and it is easy to cross over.

Strictly from the point of view of the mountain biking as sportive disciple, there are at least three distinct disciplines associated to this general denomination: cross-country (which is also an Olympic discipline), downhill and fourcross respectively. The sport of mountain bike racing was recognized relatively late, in the 90s; in the same year, the first world championships we organized. Six years later, the cross country mountain bike events were added to the sports participating to the Olympic Games.

At the end of the day, whether leisure activity, extreme sport or Olympic discipline, mountain biking requires an excellent physical conditions, a wild courage, and a total control of the mountain bike, all at amazing speeds.

Israel 1996 Sport 1.05 Mountain Bike Full Sheet Sc 1256