How Multi-Stage Mountain Bike Racers Afford Their Dream Mountain Bikes

BC Bike Race draws some serious hardware to the trails of British Columbia, and Global Mountain Bike Network set out to discover how each rider managed to afford their bike. They took a few minutes between stages to look at some impressive and unique bikes, and to ask a pretty simple question: what do you do for living?

The field at BC Bike Race, a grueling seven-day stage race covering hundreds of kilometers and thousands of meters of climbing, turned out to include a retired rider on a fully kitted Specialized S-Works Epic 8, a Google product manager on a custom-painted version of the same bike, and a bicycle shop owner from Victoria, British Columbia who showed up on a Trek Fuel LX long-travel build.

One guy traveled from Valle de Bravo, Mexico, where he runs a mountain bike shop, and rode a Scott Spark RC through the week’s stages. Meanwhile other interviewees included an optical engineer from Tucson, an MRI technologist, a highway construction worker from St. Louis who drove his van three days to get there, and a woman who runs a waste compliance software company serving the Western Canadian energy industry. Pretty wild range of professions!

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