All Things Rampage 2023

oh yes. good thing i work from home on fridays.

gee's send is so bonkers. will be so curious (terrified) to see what he scopes at the venue!

i know it's a ways out, but weather forecasts look good too. hoping wind remains as minimal as predicted.

rampage bikes from propain. note the inverted fork. since the dorado and shiver in the early 2000s, have we ever seen an inverted fork at rampage

https://www.vitalmtb.com/news/press-release/red-bull-rampage-bikes-cust…

alright, let's open the can. tommy crail making a point of how "mountain biking" at rampage is too buffed out and groomed, hitting some huge stuff on his bmx bike in the reel below. seems like majority of vital members say they want more raw, rowdy lines but judging never rewards those kinds of lines, so for days on end, build crews slap-pack miles of benchcut lines across the zone. 2028, BMX rampage?

i'll take his point seriously once he does a full rampage run instead of a single feature. 

that being said, i certainly recognize the trend towards buffed and groomed is a thing. however, as someone that would love to see more raw / natural, i also recognize that it's been an improvement to safety.  as much as we may was nostalgic about rampage days of yore, the bushwhacking era is over. 

Free solo first assent for Olly in work boots. Alex Honnold watch out!

@jonkranked tommy crail rides MTB too and is living in virgin for the winter (according to his insta account). i know the bushwhacking days are over and there have to be safe lips and landings, it's just too over-the-top with traversing sidewalks linking hyper-manicured features. i'm still bitter about brendog's score the year of the Rock. maybe olly's billygoating in that vid above is a hint at what's to come for brendan. have to imagine gee's lines will be pretty aggressive, too.

all that said, i hope everyone is safe and smart out there.

I don't follow many of the free riders on youtube, so if anyone has some good rampage vlogs please share. The behind the scenes vlogs have really added to the spectator experience of World Cup and it would be a great build up to Rampage as well.

some vlogs- strait's premieres in half hour or so

that comment was certainly a bit tongue in cheek, sorry if that didn't come across. i've ridden BMX for a long time, and have always been of the mindset that BMX has always been light years ahead of mtb, especially trickwise.

i certainly agree that the buff aspect has gone too far.  i think it stems from the judging and how each element is weighted. over the last few rampages, riders have been rewarded less for "natural" lines and more for adding a few more degrees of rotation to a spin (just an example).  so the riders see that and that's the direction they respond by going further that direction.  so in my mind i wonder if the way judges weight the individual factors should be revisited.  i recognize that they don't have an easy job due to the subjective nature of the event / scoring, but maybe there needs to be more transparency in the scoring process? or just more recognizing this event isn't the same as a slopestyle event.

Aren’t most people just going to ride the same lines they built last year? Since it is at the same venue? I usually enjoy watching the build progress of a line choice -as it’s part of the Rampage drama not knowing if they can even ride it or finish it in time.  Now it just going to be the new riders like Gee having to “inherit” a line from someone not riding or scrap out a line somewhere nobody wanted to ride previously. Basically the top riders only need to clean up their old lines and I guess make it sidewalk smooth again ?
 

(please correct me if I am wrong about most riders just riding their previously built line)

Beat me to it: the first year of the Rock drop, Brendan had the rock drop with the very dodgy entry and steep exit, a canyon gap with literally a 5foot landing, certain death if he came up short, probably hospital if he went just a few feet too long, and the chute that a bunch of other riders said was one of the gnarliest features. Judges were not impressed.

To this day I think if he had played it up "I'm not going to hit it until finals" type hype it could have massively boosted his score, but he had already done full runs in practice which the judges penalised him for (subconsciously I imagine).

His blogs are mint, I'm looking forward to watchin him, Odub and OyOy hanging around diners and shoveling dirt for a week.

gotcha, @jonkranked!

here's william robert rampage story that dropped today

Another issue is the first few riders getting low scores because the judges "need to leave room to score the following riders higher if need be" (paraphrasing a quote I saw somewhere a while back).

Yeah, this bothers me too. I guess it is done to accommodate the television production, to show the score with the rider in the finish corral, big drama and all, but it must suck to know that if you are one of the first few riders, no matter how well you lay down your run, it will be scored lower than it otherwise would have been if you'd had a better start position. They could easily not post the first run scores until after all of the first runs, allowing the judges to make adjustments after all the runs have been viewed, but it's a television show before it's a competition. 

something needs to be done about this, because as we've seen there have been years when the second run gets cancelled due to wind. so those first riders really get hosed.

the first rampage was held in 2001... the first few years it wasn't broadcast. i'm trying to remember / google the first time it was live broadcast......  2010 maybe? can't find a definitive answer. but yea, it's certainly evolved into a tv spectacle since then.

Hell yeah Tommy G!!!

As of 2022, there were four criteria for the judges to consider: "difficulty of line, air amplitude, control and fluidity, tricks and style." (Source: https://www.redbull.com/us-en/judging-red-bull-rampage) Assuming that these are weighted equally (which might not be the case), it seems like 3 out of 4 are biased against lines that are more technical, raw, or natural.  Keeping your line raw would probably contribute to a higher difficulty score, but also probably make it more difficult to score highly in the other categories. It's harder to get big amplitude without a sculpted lip and a generous landing. Harder to look controlled and fluid on a rowdier line (whether or not it actually requires more control...). Harder to throw tricks or focus on style if just riding the line takes up more of your concentration.

So, looking at it from that perspective, it seems there's a clear disincentive to build old-school, ragged-edge, raw & natural lines. It's built into the judging criteria, and unless those criteria change, riders who want to win will probably build lines that help them score higher across the most criteria.

Of course, I could be wrong, and safety/repeatability/something else could be the real driving factors. IDK. Just my 2 cents.

The judging incentives and scoring seem to be centered strictly around Live TV presentation and commentary.  It's a lot easier for the commentators to react to big tricks on jumps and drops, and seemingly the only scoreable things are jumps and drops, and the only way to improve your score on those is to trick them bigger and bigger like a slopestyle event, so here we are.  Unless you find a way to make steep, technical, raw terrain and more natural hits appear more impressive on TV and to the commentators than the more sculpted lines and trick-able jumps, then the judging will remain the way it is.  

I think they could improve on the event quite a bit honestly.  And they could keep the format largely the same.  Broadcast the runs live, preferably with some POV and drone shots, but just let the riders go when they want.  Everyone gets their first runs, and first run scoring is released with all the riders at the bottom in the corral.  Great opportunity to show replays and then the judges can even speak to the scoring as they are being presented.  This takes the immediate pressure off the judges and gets rid of the baseline scoring bias based on run order in such a radically variable and dynamic event.  Riders can all go up and take their second runs, and then again release the final scoring once they are all down. 

More priority needs to be placed on letting all of the riders get both of their runs. 

More priority needs to be placed on letting the judges view all of the runs before trying to rank them.  This is the only fair and reasonable way to score when everyone is riding COMPLETELY different lines with massive variations in line choice and terrain refinement.  Live scoring works in slopestyle because they are all riding the same course with the same baseline difficulty, with the same objective.  At this point, it's hard to not call rampage a big mountain slopestyle event when the scoring structure is essentially 100% based on slopestyle, and is only incentivizing and rewarding slopestyle tricks.  

One thing to keep in mind about scoring is that the numbers are relative, and only have meaning within the current competition. A score of 90 from today is not the same as a 90 from any other year. The numbers are only used to rank the riders. The judges could make their lives easier by automatically giving the first person a 50, then go from there. They really paint themselves into a corner sometimes when they start too high, or score too close together, making it hard to fit everyone in the right order. So in reality they could just drop the 'score' and simply rank the riders, which is all they are doing anyways.

new vlog w/ brendog - edit, watched...NO THANK YOU (such gnarly exposure)

Thought he must be joking, then the bit went on a bit too long, then they climbed on it and I got butterflies in my stomach just looking at it on screen. F*** No.

If anyone wants to follow along and win a signed Brendan Fairclough Jersey and some DMR merch feel free! I tried to create a game that would make it interesting, and somehow got some support!

The idea is pick and rank your top 5

+100 points for every chosen rider in the top 5

+100 points for every correctly chosen rider and rank (max 1000 points)

https://www.downhillmtbfantasy.com/rampage/

for the last few years, i've wondered if rampage would be better off as a jam format. 

detailed look into strait's bike here

https://www.vitalmtb.com/community/VitusbikesMTB/blog/10/06/2023/entry/…

showing it live makes it suck. too many weather issues and broadcast pressures

jam format all day long, maybe over a couple days, highlight parts shown and winners announced at a party the next night. 

I'd like to see people hitting others' lines, especially since these dudes are into heavy tricks now...but then these guys without tricks would have even less of a chance