Welcome to Pinkbike's State of the Sport Survey 2024

State of the Sport is back and after gathering the data from riders and, for the first time, race fans in our public survey, we are ready to share the results.

Since the first State of the Sport survey in 2021 which was released immediately following the bike boom during the COVID pandemic, the industry has gone through many changes that present a very different outlook for the future than the one before us three years ago. We have spent the last couple of weeks looking through the mountain of data from the rider and public surveys and have been searching for some of the biggest takeaways from this year's dataset.

Ahead of the deep dives and breakdowns of the data being released this week, we have taken a look into the survey to illustrate the demographics of the respondents and a little about our methodology and the limitations of our data collection method.

Lastly, we conducted this survey because we genuinely care. At Pinkbike, we love racing and just want to do our best to support a healthy future for the competitive side of the sport.

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Who was surveyed?

For the 2024 survey to maintain consistency with last year's survey we followed the same criteria for the rider survey with a selection of top racers invited to take part based on their 2023 overall rankings. Some of those riders declined to be included and some were unable to respond in time, but we have a broad range of riders from juniors to over 40s, from race winners to up-and-coming talents from every discipline. For our new public survey, anyone was able to submit a single set of answers.

It's important to add that for both the rider and the public survey, the surveys are completely anonymous. In particular, for the rider survey, we believe this allows respondents to be as open and honest as possible in their responses and gives us broader insights into the trends that affect the overall health of the sport.

Of those who responded to the rider survey, 47.5% compete in women's events with the majority of riders being from Europe (59.6%). We saw 25.3% of riders coming from North America, 14.1% from Oceania and 1% from Asia. Downhill was the largest discipline represented in the survey with a total of 39.4% of all respondents, next was Enduro at 32.3% and finally XC at 28.3%.



This year we also added the new public survey to our State of the Sport data gathering. Our respondents for this survey swayed heavily to people identifying as male with 96.2% of all responses. In contrast to our more European-focused rider survey, the public response was mainly from North America accounting for 62.9% of answers while we received 27.8% from Europe. While we will have more data on this later in the week, it is interesting to note that in our responses we found 91% of people said they follow mountain bike racing but only 31.5% paid for access to last year's World Cup coverage.

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Limitations

Ahead of releasing our deep dives into the data, we must address some of the limitations to both surveys that collect the data for State of the Sport. First, by having a selective overall-ranking based criteria for the rider survey, there's a selection bias towards the highest-ranking riders. While these riders will generally have the biggest impact on the racing scene, it does ignore the swathes of racers that sit just below them in the rankings.

Secondly, as both the rider and public survey are not mandatory, there is a risk that we only receive responses from people who have strong opinions on the subject and we lose a group of respondents who may have a less binary opinion on the current state of the sport.

Finally, we have to trust that every response received is honest and is an accurate representation of what they feel. The survey was taken anonymously and we have no way of knowing if the riders answered the questions with full honesty. That said, we have taken responses in good faith.

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What's next?

Over the next few days, we'll release the survey results with deep dives into the most interesting results, followed by a data dump at the end of the week that will allow you to dig into the numbers for yourself.

With this year's survey marking our third time gathering racers' opinions on the state of the sport, we will be delving deeper into the numbers and looking at how opinion has changed or even stayed the same since the first survey back in 2021.

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Racing and Events Pinkbike State Of The Sport Survey