I went to Les Gets to watch a downhill mountain bike race – here's what road racing can learn from cycling's coolest discipline

At the end of last month, I went to Les Gets in France for the Mountain Bike World Cup. This was a big trip for me, something I'd wanted to see since I first picked up a mountain bike five years ago, hooked on the glamour and whirlwind chaos of downhill racing: the crunch of tyres on dry soil, the hiss of scattered mud kicked up from the ground, the pure, mind-bending adrenaline of riding off-road.

Nestled in the Portes du Soleil area of the French Alps, Les Gets is one of the most famous tracks in the downhill circuit, primarily because of its crowds. The World Championships last year ended in fans swarming the final metres of track after the last rider came down the hill, resulting in the men's podium being escorted away by police. This year, guards combed the crowds during the race, its chaos momentarily contained to muddy hills turned slip and slides for the French fans mid-race. But, come the final rider down the hill after Rónán Dunne's blistering win, and the people charged the finish gate once more.

The Tour of Britain's record crowds last Sunday provided a similar, if slightly lesser, charge, as fans flocked to see Geraint Thomas's last race as a professional cyclist. Though there was a clear and palpable buzz in Cardiff on Sunday afternoon, its enthusiasm was contained, measured in a way downhill's often isn't. Don't get me wrong – I sidled off the hill as soon as it looked like the crowds might start running in Les Gets, but being at the Tour of Britain's finale so soon after got me thinking about what road cycling can learn from downhill mountain biking, and vice versa.

It's a difficult question to answer – they’re both so different.

The first is a team sport, the second an individual one – the fastest to the bottom of the hill wins, all whilst navigating roots, rocks, drops and changing natural terrain; road races can last upwards of three hours, to downhill’s three minutes; downhill riders can walk the track, and practise repeatedly before their race-run, while it's near impossible for road cyclists to recon every kilometre of a multi-day route.

Plus, road cycling is much older than mountain biking. The sport's premier race, the Tour de France, began in 1903, 70 years before the first mountain bikes were pieced together in Northern California in the 1970s. The 'black sheep of cycling', downhill has long been road racing's messy cousin. Its riders were boys who got hooked building trails in their local woods turned men chasing adrenaline through the Alps.

The two disciplines have similarities, too. Both have been late to encourage women into racing, and to adequately support (and financially reward) them to succeed; both have start lines composed almost entirely of white athletes, with hugely expensive kit and bikes bolstering already mountainous barriers to entry.

But downhill is fast-changing. In 2022, the coverage of the sport was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery, “to elevate the sport and reach a new global audience” after years of Red Bull’s free-to-air coverage of the UCI Downhill World Cup. A new qualifying system has been brought in, a condensed podium, and a roster of initiatives designed in part to balloon the stardom of individual riders, all behind a £30-a-month paywall. Depending on who you ask, this is a necessary step in the evolution of the sport, or a misjudged move separating fans from the sport they love.

But one thing remains true: downhill racing is, unequivocally, cool. What happened in our collective psyche to equate danger with cool, I don’t know, but hurtling down a hillside as fast as you can, reading the rocks and roots metres ahead of you at 50kph, over drops as high as two people, is pretty textbook cool. There is no doubt that the athletes really want to win, and are dedicated to their sport, but this determination is laced with an understanding that off the trails, life carries on.

In 2022 Kade Edwards came off his bike at the top of Fort William’s race track, and showboated down the rest of the course, his shot at major points gone. On the last of the three jumps, he took his hands off the bars, the crowd roaring as he whipped over the final drop. I am reminded, as I grow ever more enmeshed in the world of cycling, of Keely’s impression of the disgruntled footballer Roy in Apple TV’s ‘Ted Lasso’: “My name’s Roy, and I get paid to play a game!” I think downhill remembers this – I hope it can continue to.

Road racing, on the other hand, is a discipline evermore obsessed with data. Particularly in the modern era, the sport is one of power numbers, watts per kilo, and aerodynamic drag coefficients. Watch any Grand Tour mountain stage, and it's common to see a line of riders staring down at their cycling computers, balancing their effort by numbers. It's made for a faster, more scientific spectacle, but it's a world away from the unfiltered rawness of downhill.

And yet, both disciplines have grown out of one shared seed: the love of cycling. Downhill has kept grounded perhaps simply because of its relative newness, the memory of where it came from fresher in our collective memory. But as downhill's star rises, maybe the question isn’t what road cycling can learn from mountain biking, but rather the opposite. What happens when your sport becomes global, when its stars are propelled onto an even greater stage, and its original, rough-round-the-edges appeal gets refined?

I asked a mountain biker friend about how he thought the sport was changing. He said that when he started riding on his local trails, he would go up in the most rattly bike that could send him through the woodland the fastest, wearing whatever happened to be on at the time he set out. Now the teenage boys who have inherited his spot on the trails are dripped out in hundred-pound Fox kits, riding shiny, new, low-gravity downhill bikes that sell even second hand at upwards of £1,000.

As downhill becomes ever more commercialised, with the endless carousel of upgrades in clothes, kit and technology, the question might not be what road cycling can learn from mountain biking, but how both sports can stay grounded as they grow, and how we can hold onto what drew us all to cycling in the first place: the simple joy of riding a bike.