Swedish mountain biker Alma Wiggberg, 23, maneuvers her bike up some winding stairs and onto a roof of a building in Groningen in the Netherlands. The roar of 20,000 spectators rises from the Dutch market square 50 feet below her.
Her mind blank, she does a final exhale, a head shake, then she pedals to the edge and drops into the competition course.
This run landed the young rider the first-ever women’s title at Red Bull District Ride, one of the most prestigious competitions in slopestyle mountain biking. Women’s inclusion in this event is seen as a marker of progress, offering equal prize money and equal audience to a women’s division that didn’t exist just four years ago.
A new style of cycling for the Dutch
For one weekend in July, slopestyle mountain biking’s biggest stage took over Groningen’s Grote Markt, a centuries-old Dutch market square.
The usual market stalls and café tables were replaced with a wooden course of ramps, jumps, and wallrides built from scaffolding that towered high beside historic buildings that line the square. Riders flipped and spun across a backdrop of the distinct Martinitoren, a 500-year-old bell tower.
This is the idea behind RedBull District Ride: taking a sport usually based in mountains, dirt and forest, and bringing it to a city crowd. Starting in 2005, six District Rides have been held in Nuremberg, Germany and one in Sicily, Italy, but this year saw its Dutch debut.
District Ride is one of three Diamond competitions, the biggest courses on the Freeride Mountain Bike (FMB) World Tour, which carry major ranking significance in the Slopestyle Super League.
Course designer Desmond Tessemaker spent four months planning the event but took only four days with around 125 crew members to build the striking course.
Slopestyle is one of mountain biking’s most subjective disciplines, with no clock or racetrack. Riders take one run down the course doing aerial tricks off jumps and are judged on execution, difficulty, amplitude and variety.
Thomas Genon, a former slopestyle champion turned judge at this year’s event, told CNN Sports the competition would feature “360s to the right, to the left, backflips, front flips (and) big rotations” as riders try and “pack the most different tricks in there.”
“It’s an interesting style of mountain biking because of the individuality of each rider,” 29-year-old Griffin Paulson, a professional slopestyle rider from Canada, told CNN. “You can bring in your own creativity.”
History-making
It was on the final crowd-pleasing 50-foot roof drop and “Big Air” jump that Wiggberg secured her inaugural women’s title. Close behind her was up-and-coming 17-year-old Johanna Nussbaumer from Germany who did the first tail-whip, where riders spin the body of their bike underneath them, in a women’s competition. Natalia Niedzwiedz, 22, from Poland completed the podium despite a tough slam attempting a front flip on the final jump.
In 2024, Wiggberg cemented her place in history winning the women’s inaugural Diamond titles in Australia and Canada. Now, this women’s debut Red Bull District Ride is one more marker of progress. Riders, judges and organizers alike pointed out the tremendous progression of the sport since it was added to the FMP World Tour in 2022.
“Only a few years ago, I did the first backflip in competition,” said Robin Goomes, a 30-year-old slopestyle and freeride rider from New Zealand. “Now backflips? Everyone can do it.”
American slopestyle rider Shealen Reno, 30, added, “We just didn’t know of this sport and now it’s been four years, we’ve got the opportunity to ride courses this big and it’s just skyrocketed.”
‘There are so many men that think we shouldn’t be doing this’
Despite the rapid progression of the women’s division, there is still an obvious gap. While there were 15 male riders in Groningen, there were only six women. Wiggberg won with a backflip bar spin, where she flipped once and spun her bars. Tim Bringer won the men’s division with a backflip double tail whip to bar spin, meaning while he flipped, he spun the body of his bike beneath him twice and his bars once.
The gap isn’t unique to this weekend, most events with women’s divisions still see smaller women’s lineups and less progressed trick difficulty.
Numerous female competitors report receiving social media comments that take issue with this.
“There are so many men that think we shouldn’t be doing this and that we are a joke,” said Reno, who’s grown to expect some negative comments.
“There’s definitely so many internet chats (where) they think, unless women are doing like twisters and double backflips and everything the guys are doing right now, that they shouldn’t be here,” said Goomes. Yet, the Kiwi rider feels confident that women will get to those complex combination tricks in time.
Catching air and catching up
For those asking why does the gap exist, the answers in Groningen were usually the same: Women’s slopestyle is younger than its male counterpart.
Tarek Rasouli, sporting director and co-creator of the event, has been around to see slopestyle develop as a discipline.
“It’s a natural gap because (male) slopestyle existed since the early 2000s and so the men had a longer time, lots more events, and lots more riders that got into the sport,” Rasouli told CNN, whereas women have only been riding Diamond-level courses alongside the men since 2024.
For many women who grew up mountain biking, slopestyle wasn’t an obvious path. Several women in the Slopestyle Super League started elsewhere. Reno was in BMX racing, Goomes was in downhill racing and Wiggberg started in the cross-country discipline.
“Lots of the boys … grew up riding skateparks when they were younger, whereas almost all the girls are from different disciplines,” Wiggberg said. “It was not the first thing they started riding.”
According to Lauren Hulme, a rider manager and administrator for the Freeride Mountain Bike Association, part of that comes down to a lack of female role models and women not being able to see themselves in the field.
“Some of them don’t even realize that that’s an opportunity that they could get into because there was never a pathway for them to get into it,” she told CNN.
Then there’s money. Most professional riders receive financial support through sponsorship contracts; otherwise they must pay their own way to competitions. Hulme reports there are fewer sponsorship opportunities in female slopestyle compared to other disciplines, suspecting that fewer amateur women are specializing in slopestyle and resulting in a smaller market.
“Some women are going into freeride instead because there’s sponsorship that allows them to support that better,” Hulme said, “so it’s a kind of cycle of, ‘We want more women in the sport,’ but then they’re faced with barriers of sponsorship or access.”
Inspiring more ‘Backflip Barbies’
Genon, who formerly competed on the FMB World Tour in slopestyle, remembers his doubts when women first joined Diamond-level competitions, as he worried the jumps were too big.
“But now I look back and (adding women) was accurate because the progression was so fast,” reflected Genon. “Now, it’s not even a question of if you need women in a big contest like this.”
When female competitors were added, Hulme recalls there was discussion between event organizers about building a separate smaller course, but the “women would come back and say, ‘No, we want to ride what the men are riding.’”
Now, sporting director Rasouli points to younger riders like Wiggberg and Nussbaumer’s performances as proof of why women should to be on this course, calling it “the greatest showcase so far of female slopestyle.”
The Redbull District Ride co-founder said that there was no question in his mind about showcasing women’s slopestyle on the biggest stage. Rasouli is confident that with time, exposure and equal opportunity, the women’s field will continue to progress.
“I think there’s some 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds out there that are watching some of these women,” added rider manager Hulme, “and now that they know that there’s a pathway there, it’s only going to continue to grow.”
Young riders know New Zealand’s Goomes by her nickname, “Backflip Barbie.” She says girls will call out to her on bike trails and tell her they want to pursue riding because of her.
“I hope the young girls watching … keep riding their bikes and have fun knowing this is an opportunity for them,” Goomes told CNN.
“I want to encourage young men to be supportive and encouraging to the young women that are out there doing the same thing as them. They’ve got it in them.”
The-CNN-Wire
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