As long as the better rider follows and unweights while they roll over their friends we should definitely have more of this. "Ride over your friend Friday"? But please no more of those orange Giant drop off head first pile drivers please, I felt sick watching that.
@leviatanouroboro: 1:12 looks like a Fox 36 Performance Elite with an MRP Ramp Control cartridge upgrade. Without the latter, they both would've died. #science
In general, I think we need more themed Friday Fails special editions. Let's start a list:
1. OTB's 2. Dead Sailors 3. Broken Bikes 4. Collisions 5. Run Over Your Friend Because You're Following Too Close 6. Mid-air collisions 7. Tree strikes 8. Pedal strikes 9. Locking your brakes up as you go off a drop 10. Front end wash-outs
@srjacobs: Unconcerned parents Overconcerned parents Children who bounce What's down here? Where did they go? Falls from a height Overcommitting to undercommitment
1) I think the real fail is people who film vertically.
2) long time ago when Bearclaw just came into mountain biking I noticed how big his arms were. I was in the gym but I would skip arm and chest day and double up on leg day. I started working my upper body and all the sudden the number of times I went over the bars because my arms folded under the pressure declined rapidly. I see a lot of crashes because the person doesn't have the strength to hold the bar straight on landing. 3) the scene with the young kid on the shity bike jumping off a small retaining wall took me back to the good old days of setting up plywood ramps.
Incorrect. Your arms are just ballasts. You load the rear of bike thru muscle recruitment and body placement. That's what gives you stability and prevents the need to hold yourself from falling forward. Prevent the forward motion first and then you won't have to hold your body with your arms.
@Yody: Yeah like Noah says, the point was more about what happens after your body position has already failed you and you need to rely on upper body strength to save you. So many of the Friday fails could be avoided with some push ups.
Did the dude who nosedived off the drop at 2:15 live? That was hard to watch. This edition of the fails should be shown to people thinking they can take it slow of drops.
Was it his technique that was wrong? Butt too far back and hit the rear wheel? And if 29 inch wheels are bigger, can I say that a fella who has poor technique + 29 wheels= higher chances of becoming 'superman'?
I felt bad for her, I've never done that personally but I've had that feeling of terror from when your front wheel starts dropping juuuuust before your back wheel leaves the drop. Terrifying.
This is exactly how my wife broke her back. I home this one was ok. She seems to have a little forward momentum when she hit but not much to dissipate the energy.
@kilazilla: it looked like the person had never ridden a drop before. You don't lean back as you're coming off a drop. On a bigger drop it may look like the rider is leaning back because they are pushing the bike forward, but that is not what was happening here.
@hardtailparty: Yeah, I can get a laugh out of watching decent riders cock something up, but there's always a bunch of people in these vids who are obvious new riders trying stuff that's way outside their current skill level.
@garb0: the nose starting dropping just as soon as it was free of the edge.
And then he or she decided to dive into the ground with his/her head just before impact. This increasing the chances of a cervical compression fracture.
@mhoshal: or push out the bars, momentarily elevating front wheel. I like to stomp the pedals just before to unweight the bike. Also works when bowling over crashed riders!
I enjoy fails when riders are pushing their limits, but the girl at 2:07 was riding so far beyond her skill level on a high-consequence feature that it's slightly infuriating. There's nothing we can learn from this clip, and there's no enjoyment in viewing. She needs more experience on small drops, and she needs more experience crashing. Hell, she actively presses her front-end into the drop, then she drives her damn head into the ground.
We’ve all been there, but not all of us crashed. Then not all of us are aware of how close were to eating it. Bikeparks all over the world are filled with folks who kind of make it. I gues all of us have seen this dude who sends dead sailors on medium or even big lines all day long then goes home happy with his skills.
The law of close calls. If You miss a big digger and know you know it - you learn faster than those who get a digger or those who don’t know they will get it soon.
@WAKIdesigns: Success is over here --on the spectrum, while the video shows the other end --> of the spectrum. This isn't a "try again, and you got it" scenario. The "law of close calls" does not apply, unfortunately.
@spankthewan: I don't mean it applies here. I mean it applies in life in general. You learn on your mistakes much better than on mistakes of others. If you crash you have to learn on your mistake and then deal with mental and often physical injury. Psychological trauma can be hard to root out. Close calls leave a mark on your memory and are often motivationg. They don't lead to physical trauma and rarely lead to mental trauma. It's not my concept. You made a few repetitive dead sailors ending in a very sketchy landing realizing what is happening - you got scared, you are unable to visualize a serious injury coming from that - you can adjust and start learning immediately. You smacked your face in tho the ground, got concussed and cracked a few vertebrae - even if you recover physically to 99% - deal with that mentally for months or years or life. It will affect your motorics quite a lot, despite having no neurological hinders per say. And that can happen on a stupid small jump.
Being oblivious to serious risks in face of serious lacks in technique - hard smack at some point. You are not motivated to learn as much Close Call - you are scared of a particular feature for a relatively short period of time. You are more motivated to learn Hard smack - you are scared of everything for a long period of time. You may lose motivation to ride like you used to.
This drop is something I wouldn’t know how to handle, so I watched the video for what went wrong and how her technique created that issue. Because of slo mo in the video, it’s hard to tell what speed she dropped at. It looks like she shifts her weight down and backwards just before going off the edge. It doesn’t look like she pushes the front end down - more like the front drops and pulls her arms straight (unbending her elbow) and forward. I’ve never gone off a flat drop off anywhere near this high but this technique of weight back, arms not locked out, sometimes compressing the suspension before the jump to use the rebound to unweighted the bike, works ok on the small stuff. Of course, lots of wrong stuff works ok on small stuff. So I can practice good technique, what should she have done to keep the bike mostly level?
@lastminutepanic: in the video her reaction is to lean all the way back and simply roll off the end of the jump. Her bum stopped the back tire but it didn't matter because she was face planting anyway. When hitting drops you want to be neutral right up to the edge followed by either a) a slight lift of the bars followed by scooping your feet, like a mid air bunny hop or b) hit it at enough speed that you don't need to lift and can push forward on the bars. Really a drop like this you would hit with more speed, stay neutral and basically do nothing else.
@lastminutepanic: It's honestly hard to tell from this video, but I'll put the options out there:
• It looks like her right index finger was feathering the rear brake, and she let off right as her front left the feature. • She didn't compress the suspension on takeoff. • She possibly made an attempt to compress too late. Watch her right foot. • Watch her flex at the hips to lower her upper body. This could start a bit of forward rotation. • She was going too slow for her body position. Going too slow will require you to almost manual off a drop, or at least be way in the back seat. This is never an option for beginners.
@lastminutepanic: Agreed that it's hard to tell fully what happens with the slow-mo, but with how fast the front wheel dropped, there clearly wasn't enough speed.
@friendlyfoe: depends on the drop and speed. That was quite little speed or she’d make it to the landing. Slowmo hides eventual braking on the bridge. All it takes is to lunge the bike too early, but late enough for the front to already leave the edge. This is what causes catapult effect on drops and jumps - timing of active leaning back/ lunging/lofting the bike, whatever you want to call it. Of speed is too low you do need to lean back. Even lower and you need to wheelie drop. This can be experimented and proved when applying different techniques off a taller curb. Not all shifting your weight back involves driving with hips/legs, but all driving with hips/ legs involves shifting your weight back.
“Don’t lean back”, “stay neutral” is the current cool word among coaches. A bit like: “don’t have sex before marriage”, “drugs, not even once”
@WAKIdesigns: if you read it again I only said you should stay neutral right up to the edge of the drop. Pushing the bike forward looks a lot like leaning back but is a very different motion. I can't think of any reason you would want to lean back coming off a drop. YMMV
@friendlyfoe: when leaving the drop be neutral, I know what you mean but to an untrained “ear” that means ride off the drop in neutral position which means don’t do anything while riding off a drop with light hands heavy feet. This often means finding yourself flying front heavy and if speed and distance allows, land just ok.
You want to perform an anti-row movement timing it so that on the edge you are very temporarily neutral. That may mean begin movement 4ft before the edge, end 6ft behind it.
People should devote quality time to riding pumptracks, then apply it in the terrain. In the case of the srop one can treat the edge as the top of the roller. There’s no neutral on the pumptrack there’s active between fore and aft all the time!
@WAKIdesigns: My post does not say to be neutral leaving the drop. It says to be neutral before the drop. Anyway it was in response to another users question, and the better answer is go watch whichever episode of going full enduro where she learns drops. They mostly use the pushing the bike forward method, and not the lift on the bars and scoop with your feet but a great demonstration none the less. I feel the latter is used for flat drops to flat landings.
Oh and someone also mentioned something about compressing the suspension before taking off. That is a technique for table tops/jumps, not for riding drops.
I think I’d like to focus on either weight shift or manualing off the edge because: 1) what if the landing is really steep? If I just throw more speed at the problem, a 5ft drop becomes a 15ft drop, and maybe that’s not what I want (it’s definitely not) 2) what if there’s very little space after the landing? Maybe the landing rolls into a sharp turn quickly, and I’ll be in the trees if I fly off the drop. I was just watching Ben Cathro’s coverage of the snowshoe World Cup, and he spend some time analyzing exactly this kind of drop.
I’ve seen Friday fails where people have the opposite problem - they loop out on the landing, so it must be possible to manual/shift weight to stay neutral off the drop, even at slower speeds. I don’t know how to manual so I’m pretty limited in the tools I have so far. It’s on the winter list of skills to acquire.
There’s a section of a local trail where the edge of the trail has a steep drop off and in one spot it’s open so you can ride off it. Essentially this means making a 90 degree turn mid trail and going off maybe a 3ft drop with a steep landing and not much room before you have to make another hard right to rejoin the trail. The entrance to it doesn’t allow you to carry much speed because of the initial sharp turn, and the exit would punish you if you did carry this speed. It’s these sort of “short cuts” that I’d like to be able to handle.
I mentioned compression before launch because that’s what I’d use to pop off the lip of a tiny jump (something like a 1ft tall dirt mound in the trail). I can see how it’s less effective without the lip.
I’ve never tried pushing the bike forward off a drop. Gotta experiment with that.
If you can only get 2-3 pedal strokes in from a near stop you have to decide what is more likely to get the back wheel off the end of the drop, either pushing forward or bunny hopping off the end of the drop.
@lastminutepanic: The key to drops is being able to control the angle of your bike to match the angle of the landing (applicable to most drops but not all). Each drop will have a range of acceptable speed with a minimum speed to make the landing and a maximum that causes you to overshoot it. Generally, the longer the landing zone the wider the range of speed you can use.
There are a ton of videos out on YouTube on how to take drops (gmbn has a couple as a starting point) so I won't try to recreate that with some long word salad on the finer points of the technique.
The best thing you can do is to practice on small drops and get comfortable varying the angle of your bike on the landing. You can practice this going off tall curbs. Keep practicing until you can land off the curb front wheel first, level, or back wheel first at any speed from say 3 mph to 15 or 20 mph. Doing this will teach you how aggressive of a weight shift it takes to adjust you landing angle at different speeds.
Then find another drop that is a little larger and give that a go. Most bike parks have skillls areas with a range of drops from small to large to help you progress. Dont move to the next bigger drop until you can comfortably nail the landing angle every time on the one you are on.
With that approach and a little bit of practice, you can progress pretty quickly and safely.
@Thustlewhumber: I was with him until he claimed head tube angle affects how much you need to shift your weight off a drop. That's BS, but chain stay length is factor 1 (rear tire's contact patch being the pivot point), and front center is factor 2, because it will affect your center of mass.
@friendlyfoe: depends again. If you want to prejump, then you do want to compress... just not on the edge. Then if speed is quite low you also want to compress and hop off the edge. Depends depends depends...
@WAKIdesigns: Is there a reason you are trolling me? One minute it's "a novice rider could take that the wrong way" and next it's "well that advice isn't totally true because there's this super advanced technique that only someone who doesn't need advice would use."
@friendlyfoe: whatever happens, you have to react. And that reaction is a certain pattern of movement starting from point A to point C where point B is the edge of the drop and the only constant is point C. And only relatively constant because where you land is dependent on what is behind landing. There are 3 main techniques: loft/squash, stomp/prehop, wheelie drop. Each single one involves certain level of compression as the first part of the movement. How much compression depends on choice of technique. Choice of technique is dependent mainly on available speed and distance to cover. One may also mention 2 main landing techniques. Front first/ flat and rear first.
In 90% of cases speed is abundant and distance to cover is quite irrelevant. Hence lofting just works. Correct lofting technique starts with 1. slight compression, bringing chest forward, to bent elbows, 2. then slight push on bars and slight hip thrust, relaxing legs (leaving edge) 3. Hunch, crouch in the air to gain range of movement to control the bike, 4. Extend to land - 5. Land.
All these movements take around 1.5s to perform. Like a bunnyhop. One has to consider how long distance one covers in 1.5-2sec depending on speed. Especially 0.5-1sec for phase Ato B. Depending on speed one has to adjust timing of beginning of movement and its intensity.
Zero skill Fridays.
I've said it more than once, but I would LOVE to know how many of these douches crucify companies for their products not being 'good enough.'
If you're a frame manufacturer and have had to weather comments about how weak your frames are, or how your linkage technology is subpar, it's best to remember who your market truly is.
Friday fails is the market research opportunity.
Lane Myers: Are you going to help me or not? Charles De Mar: Alright, alright, alright I will tell you what to do. Go that way really fast. If something gets in your way...turn.
I have had my share of small Wrecks and wash outs and bumps and bruises but 10 days ago i broke my wrist in 3 places and have to have a plate put in on Tuesday, i had clearly forgot the words that my Dad always told me before racing motocross "keep it on 2 Wheels" but we cant live our lives so carefully all the time your not willing to take risk and have fun, I have told my kids the same and added "its not a matter for IF but When", we will all have a wreck some time after that its going to be a mental thing and a pain tolerance thing to get back on and ride as hard as you once did, i was looking forward to riding this winter with my kids but ill just watch and heal up and wait till spring. Cheers to the ones in these videos who wrecked and get back on and continue to ride!!!
There is careful and there is stupid. Trying to walk the line between is important.
Some of these fails are people barreling down loose and out of control, others are total lack of technical capability. Probably also with friends and not bothering to do a sighting run on the trail but just go full bore down it first run.
If I did that yesterday on the trail I was riding I would have been f'd. There was a hell of a lot of rubbish on the trail that had to be dealt with before letting go. Joy of riding Australian bush - trees drop their branches. Also a large tree down over the trail which although clear-able with a good hop (3-4ft high) - the other side was not good for landing (could make a good feature though with a little work).
Riding up each others ass also ain't the best idea either but I suppose that's another form of bonding.
2:05 I saw the exact same face smash spinal cord dismantlement scorpion of death type of crash unfold right before me at our local trails in Quebec city. This dude was trying to make his girl execute a double black drop way bigger than the one in the video. She got served proper let me tell ya... My 0.02$ don't skip learning steps, master small features before attacking bigger ones.
Why hasn't the full Mike crash from the field test made the Friday fails yet....all we get is the little clip in the intro....I want to see the lead up and the post crash cursing....Some hard evidence of the supposed low BB height and resulting pedal strike please.
Good cringe to gut laugh ratio today...
So much good stuff in this video-
My takeaways-
Lots of sick looking trails.
Lots of people trying to catch big air before learning how to ride a bike.
Speed can be your best friend.
Speed can be your worst friend
Always watch this with audio..the commentary is just as good as the wrecks.
This inspires me. Do you remember the self-filmed video of Trespasser: vimeo.com/25379880?
I could do with a trail that I barely made it down riding the brakes the whole way but send it. I'll film every cased jump and slide out on all the berms. Maybe a nice OTB on the drops.
I feel like Friday fails are either people falling over from hitting a leaf in the trail while they have head to toe pads on, or people sending the sketchiest jumps as hard as possible. Glad this week was the latter.
Okay, enough of the nervous laughter and cringing at the fails. Can we push through the last of the Upcountry bikes so that the Field Test can move on to the meat and potatoes?
Wow that kid locking up his back wheel on that super steep ramp @1:59!! Holy shit he hit the ground hard! And right after that with that wooden slat drop! Damn that's a trip to the hospital right there...
2:05 shows yet another example of a husband/boyfriend attempting to get his significant other into mountain biking and failing miserably. My guess is we could do a complete Friday Fails edition dedicated to this phenomenon
oh shit is that the jump at the slags at Frick?? Didnt realize it until I went back and re-watched. My buddy was daring me to do it and I was about too but got sketched out. There's wayyy too much of a dip right before it and the landing is garbage. If you start at the top or have too much speed I feel like you'd over shoot the whole thing.
looking at the evidence, females must be better riders than males as they are almost never in Friday Fails. that's how the transitive property works right?
Looks like a Rylo or some other 360 camera. There’s a seam where the two lens images are stitched together that makes up-close stuff invisible but looks like a weird break in the image sometimes.
You know you are a real biker when you find yourself whispering bro when talking to yourself
But please no more of those orange Giant drop off head first pile drivers please, I felt sick watching that.
1. OTB's
2. Dead Sailors
3. Broken Bikes
4. Collisions
5. Run Over Your Friend Because You're Following Too Close
6. Mid-air collisions
7. Tree strikes
8. Pedal strikes
9. Locking your brakes up as you go off a drop
10. Front end wash-outs
Keep 'em comin!
++
11. Rear Shock Reboooouuuund
Like Ross when she left him at the airport?
Unconcerned parents
Overconcerned parents
Children who bounce
What's down here?
Where did they go?
Falls from a height
Overcommitting to undercommitment
12. Looking at your front wheel rather than looking ahead
1) I think the real fail is people who film vertically.
2) long time ago when Bearclaw just came into mountain biking I noticed how big his arms were. I was in the gym but I would skip arm and chest day and double up on leg day. I started working my upper body and all the sudden the number of times I went over the bars because my arms folded under the pressure declined rapidly. I see a lot of crashes because the person doesn't have the strength to hold the bar straight on landing.
3) the scene with the young kid on the shity bike jumping off a small retaining wall took me back to the good old days of setting up plywood ramps.
Vertical video syndrome!
And then he or she decided to dive into the ground with his/her head just before impact. This increasing the chances of a cervical compression fracture.
The law of close calls. If You miss a big digger and know you know it - you learn faster than those who get a digger or those who don’t know they will get it soon.
Being oblivious to serious risks in face of serious lacks in technique - hard smack at some point. You are not motivated to learn as much
Close Call - you are scared of a particular feature for a relatively short period of time. You are more motivated to learn
Hard smack - you are scared of everything for a long period of time. You may lose motivation to ride like you used to.
Close call wins.
• It looks like her right index finger was feathering the rear brake, and she let off right as her front left the feature.
• She didn't compress the suspension on takeoff.
• She possibly made an attempt to compress too late. Watch her right foot.
• Watch her flex at the hips to lower her upper body. This could start a bit of forward rotation.
• She was going too slow for her body position. Going too slow will require you to almost manual off a drop, or at least be way in the back seat. This is never an option for beginners.
“Don’t lean back”, “stay neutral” is the current cool word among coaches. A bit like: “don’t have sex before marriage”, “drugs, not even once”
You want to perform an anti-row movement timing it so that on the edge you are very temporarily neutral. That may mean begin movement 4ft before the edge, end 6ft behind it.
People should devote quality time to riding pumptracks, then apply it in the terrain. In the case of the srop one can treat the edge as the top of the roller. There’s no neutral on the pumptrack
Cheers!
Oh and someone also mentioned something about compressing the suspension before taking off. That is a technique for table tops/jumps, not for riding drops.
I think I’d like to focus on either weight shift or manualing off the edge because:
1) what if the landing is really steep? If I just throw more speed at the problem, a 5ft drop becomes a 15ft drop, and maybe that’s not what I want (it’s definitely not)
2) what if there’s very little space after the landing? Maybe the landing rolls into a sharp turn quickly, and I’ll be in the trees if I fly off the drop. I was just watching Ben Cathro’s coverage of the snowshoe World Cup, and he spend some time analyzing exactly this kind of drop.
I’ve seen Friday fails where people have the opposite problem - they loop out on the landing, so it must be possible to manual/shift weight to stay neutral off the drop, even at slower speeds. I don’t know how to manual so I’m pretty limited in the tools I have so far. It’s on the winter list of skills to acquire.
There’s a section of a local trail where the edge of the trail has a steep drop off and in one spot it’s open so you can ride off it. Essentially this means making a 90 degree turn mid trail and going off maybe a 3ft drop with a steep landing and not much room before you have to make another hard right to rejoin the trail. The entrance to it doesn’t allow you to carry much speed because of the initial sharp turn, and the exit would punish you if you did carry this speed. It’s these sort of “short cuts” that I’d like to be able to handle.
I mentioned compression before launch because that’s what I’d use to pop off the lip of a tiny jump (something like a 1ft tall dirt mound in the trail). I can see how it’s less effective without the lip.
I’ve never tried pushing the bike forward off a drop. Gotta experiment with that.
Greg Minnar off that rock drop at the snowshoe dh world cup. He pushes the bike forward as he goes off it as opposed to leaning back. You should watch a bunch of riders and the slow mo replay of them going off that. For me a fun place to experiment was just on little 2 foot kicker jumps to experience what happens when you push forward in the air.
www.pinkbike.com/photo/18058061
www.redbull.com/int-en/events/uci-mtb-world-cup-snowshoe-live-stream/live/uci-mtb-world-cup-2019-snowshoe-mens-dh-finals
There are a ton of videos out on YouTube on how to take drops (gmbn has a couple as a starting point) so I won't try to recreate that with some long word salad on the finer points of the technique.
The best thing you can do is to practice on small drops and get comfortable varying the angle of your bike on the landing. You can practice this going off tall curbs. Keep practicing until you can land off the curb front wheel first, level, or back wheel first at any speed from say 3 mph to 15 or 20 mph. Doing this will teach you how aggressive of a weight shift it takes to adjust you landing angle at different speeds.
Then find another drop that is a little larger and give that a go. Most bike parks have skillls areas with a range of drops from small to large to help you progress. Dont move to the next bigger drop until you can comfortably nail the landing angle every time on the one you are on.
With that approach and a little bit of practice, you can progress pretty quickly and safely.
In 90% of cases speed is abundant and distance to cover is quite irrelevant. Hence lofting just works. Correct lofting technique starts with 1. slight compression, bringing chest forward, to bent elbows, 2. then slight push on bars and slight hip thrust, relaxing legs (leaving edge) 3. Hunch, crouch in the air to gain range of movement to control the bike, 4. Extend to land - 5. Land.
All these movements take around 1.5s to perform. Like a bunnyhop. One has to consider how long distance one covers in 1.5-2sec depending on speed. Especially 0.5-1sec for phase Ato B. Depending on speed one has to adjust timing of beginning of movement and its intensity.
Charles De Mar: Alright, alright, alright I will tell you what to do. Go that way really fast. If something gets in your way...turn.
Some of these fails are people barreling down loose and out of control, others are total lack of technical capability. Probably also with friends and not bothering to do a sighting run on the trail but just go full bore down it first run.
If I did that yesterday on the trail I was riding I would have been f'd. There was a hell of a lot of rubbish on the trail that had to be dealt with before letting go. Joy of riding Australian bush - trees drop their branches. Also a large tree down over the trail which although clear-able with a good hop (3-4ft high) - the other side was not good for landing (could make a good feature though with a little work).
Riding up each others ass also ain't the best idea either but I suppose that's another form of bonding.
I could do with a trail that I barely made it down riding the brakes the whole way but send it. I'll film every cased jump and slide out on all the berms. Maybe a nice OTB on the drops.