RAMPAGE REVOLUTION
How women bashed down the door to freeride’s pinnacle event
Words
Laura Williamson
Images
Red Bull Content Pool
Katie Holden’s post said it all: “Holy s*** we f***ing did it”. It was June 5, 2024, and she had just found out that, 23 years after the event was first held, women will be competing at Red Bull Rampage.
Rampage needs little introduction. Billed as the world’s premiere big mountain freeride event, it is, for many, the pinnacle of competitive mountain biking. Held annually among the spectacular rocks and red earth of Virgin, Utah, it’s the place where all the elements of off-road riding come together: the speed and steeps of DH, the precision and athleticism of slopestyle, the balls of freeride. The lines are crazy steep, the gaps crazy wide, and the risk of injury palpable, to the point that it can be hard to watch.
Did I say balls? I did, and I suppose until now that’s the only metaphor that applied.
No more. The 2024 Red Bull Rampage roster included 18 men, and for the first time, eight women. Even better three of the eight, Vinny Armstrong, Veronique Sandler, and Robin Goomes, were Kiwis, while a fourth, Casey Brown, was born here and lived in New Zealand until the age of 11.
Thanks to our female athletes, Aotearoa had more riders per capita sending it in the Utah dirt than any other country. And they weren’t just making up the numbers, Robin was crowned the first-ever women’s winner, with Veronique and Vinny stomping their runs to take fifth and sixth.
A brief history of Rampage
Lack of women aside, Rampage is just the best. It’s sometimes called the Super Bowl of mountain biking, but it’s more than that because it’s not just Americans and it’s way scarier than chucking a ball around.
The inaugural invitation-only event was held in 2001, running 17 times over the past 23 years. Canada’s Wade Simmons won the first Rampage, which was held at a site on the western edge of Zion National Park. That incarnation ran until 2004, after which there was a bit of a hiatus due to safety concerns.
This isn’t surprising if footage if the early Rampages are anything to go by. It’s pretty horrifying to watch, with gear, experience and skillsets not what they are today: near misses on the edge of cliffs, gaps not made, old-school bikes rattling over the bony terrain. As Kyle Strait, a two-time winner who competed at the first Rampage in 2001as a 14-year-old recalls, “I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know if I could do drops.” He could, and he now is the only rider to have appeared at every Rampage.
The event returned on a new site in 2008, the riding got more fluid with more tricks, wooden features came and went, but what made it special from the start stayed the same. The event’s point of difference, and main attraction, is that the riders scope and build their own lines with the help of a dig crew. On finals days, riders get two runs and are judged on four criteria: line choice difficulty, airtime and amplitude, control and fluidity, and tricks and style. Watching the athletes control their own fates, and level of risk, and adds a whole other dimension for those of us watching and commentating on social media from the safety of our couches at home.
In some ways, this makes Rampage highly suited for the inclusion of both genders. Riders don’t all have to hit the same features, unlike events like Red Bull Hardline, which is one course, take it or leave it. Yet Hardline started to include female athletes in 2022, with New Zealand’s Jess Blewitt the first woman to take it on, and Canadian Gracey Hemstreet the first female winner earlier this year. She actually beat two of the guys.
The long road to Utah
For the American rider Katie Holden, a highly accomplished downhiller who won the 2010 Pan American Mountain Bike Continental Champs and the 2012 US Grand Prix (she also, famously, gapped over a moving Red Bull trophy truck), Rampage is the pinnacle of her sport.
“The first time I went [as a digger, in 2010] I was completely enamoured by it. It kind of changed me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was all these components: the gnarly riding, the jumps and the drops, the camaraderie, teams working together to bring lines to life.”
She decided to do everything she could to get herself invited.
“I felt like if I did everything right it would happen. I basically spent two years building other skills, like writing, and doing photos, so I could present myself, plus getting race results. I was building every part of my resume so I could get in.”
It was good timing. Katie had joined Liv as their first ambassador, Instagram had just launched, GoPro was a thing. But a crash while filming footage for Liv, which was meant to be her Rampage entry edit, followed by back-to-back shoulder injuries meant “the dream kind of died then and there”, Katie recalls. Or her personal dream, to be more precise. By then, there were broader goals in play.
Career-wise, Rampage is arguably the most important event for freeride athletes. It’s a spectacle with a 20-year-plus history that attracts massive media attention. It makes careers. As the years went by, the exclusion of women felt more and more off. Katie got stuck into advocacy. As she explained in a post: “When women are not allowed to compete at the highest levels, it limits earning potential with partners; it limits media coverage; it limits exposure and the generation of a fan base; it creates a shallower talent pool; it limits relevancy; it limits training resources; it limits opportunities. Denying inclusion in events, year after year, digs the women’s field into a deeper hole.”
I dream it, I work hard
Women’s freeriding has exploded over the past few years and so has the level of skill. It turns out that when women have access to resources training and experiences, they smash it, just like male athletes.
Take Casey Brown. If anyone deserves to be at Rampage, it’s her. She’s had successful World Cup DH and Enduro World Series careers, was Canadian National Champion and has been a regular on the Crankworx World Tour. But freeride is her passion, and her credentials are impeccable. For example, in 2017 Casey headed to Jackson Hole Mountain Resorts’ notorious Corbet’s Couloir, which is accessed via dropping off a 6m-high cornice into a 3m-wide corridor. It’s terrifying on skis or a snowboard—Casey and Cam McCaul became the first people to ride it on bikes.
Casey is a freeride star, and she has had Rampage in her sights for much of the past decade. She attended the 2008 event as a 17-year-old.
According to Red Bull, she said, “Watching Red Bull Rampage felt like I was witnessing the pinnacle of the sport … there was so much energy around the event that you knew you were part of something special.”
Ten years later she was part of Bas van Steenbergen’s dig crew, digging being a common initiation for aspiring competitors. In 2019, she became the first and only woman to appear at Proving Grounds, a new Rampage qualifying event.
Meanwhile, progress was happening elsewhere with the launch of a first-of-its-kind progression event called Formation, masterminded by Katie Holden. Set at the 2015 Rampage site, the first year saw six riders invited, including New Zealand’s Vinny Armstrong.
They spent two days digging and two days riding; it was not a competition, and there was no winner, no prize money, and limited media coverage. The idea, according to Katie, was more than rider progression, although that was a big part of it, the chance for some “exposure therapy” on the terrain and lines that Rampage demands. But it was also about creating visibility and developing leaders in the women’s freeride space, as well as working as a team for the benefit of everyone involved.
Katie explains the inception of Formation. “Rebecca Rush [a fellow Liv ambassador and seven-time World Champion in multiple cycling disciplines] has always been a mentor, and she’s been close to me throughout my career. She came to Ramage in 2017 and knew how much I was obsessed. She really stared to ask the questions. Why weren’t women involved?”
A meeting ensued in 2018, which brought in employees, athletes and leaders in the space, exploring the possibility of progress. Then, in June of the next year, Katie got a call from Red Bull. Formation began to take shape. According to Katie, at the time “no one could picture six women riding in the desert”.
“It just felt like too much for people.”
And, just like Kyle Strait’s experience at his first Rampage back in 2001, the fear was real.
“The riders were spooked, but after they built their first line, they were like, ‘that was so easy.”
Katie Holden
“The riders were spooked, but after they built their first line, they were like, ‘that was so easy’. No one got hurt, no one even crashed – they blew their own expectations out of the water. They just needed the tools and resources.”
As Beyonce sings in her Formation, “I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it.”
Formation ran for three years, and by 2022 the list of invited athletes had doubled. If you haven’t watched any of the footage, you should. Check out the 2022 highlights to see smooth operators Hannah Bergemann and Casey Brown own Brett Rheeder’s 2015 Rampage line, and the POV of Robin Goomes’ run, which includes a no-hander drop and a backflip on the final jump. If I’m honest, viewing it made me feel like I had to wee a little. It leaves no doubt these riders belong in the Utah desert.
Then, in 2023, Red Bull announced that Formation was off, which sounds like bad news, but briefly felt like it might be a precursor to the good news that Rampage would be opening up to women. It was not to be … that year at least. As the media team explained, “Red Bull Rampage is the most difficult freeride mountain bike competition in the world. For this reason, a selection panel invites the best 18 riders globally to compete … we are exploring with industry experts how we might develop a women’s category at Red Bull Rampage.”
It was starting to feel like the event was on the wrong side of history, and not just in mountain biking. Barbie was the world’s highest grossing film, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour kicked off its run to becoming the first to ever to gross more than US$1 billion. Meanwhile, Jess was at Hardline, Robin and Casey were clearing the 90-foot goliath Darkfest jump, Vinny was redefining the whip-off, and Rachel Atherton came back at the age of 35 to win the UCI race in Lenzerheide, after which she casually headed back to the pits to breastfeed her 21-month-old daughter, which is a whole other level of badassery.
As Katie says, “It felt like this crazy injection into women’s sport and business, and women were riding that wave.”
The hashtag #letthemride” started doing the rounds, and male riders like two-time Rampage winner Brett Rheeder backed bringing women on board.
Because it’s Rampage
In June 2024, the announcement came. Red Bull Rampage would move to a two-day event and include women for the first time. They’d be riding at a fresh site, instead of refurbishing old lines like they did with Formation.
For Katie, it was the culmination of a long road, for her, for her fellow riders and advocates, for the post, for Rampage itself.
“I had heard whisperings that things were happening, but I didn’t believe it until I was 100 per cent sure. When I got the call, I was on the big screen in a conference room. I cried the whole time and proceeded to cry for a long time after. It was the emotion of the women getting their moment. It feels like such an insane community effort; so many people really, truly worked together and wanted to see the best for each other. That is the most special part.”
It was a momentous day for Kiwi rider Robin Goomes, who not only went on to land the podium’s top step but also took home the prize for best trick.
Just like in 2001, what happened at Rampage will reverberate in the future. As third place getter and winner of the McGazza Spirit Award Casey explained on the Just Ride podcast.
“The trickle-down effect for the whole industry is going to be huge … This is not just for us, this for all the little girls out there that want to be a mountain biker now have an option to set their goals at that height.”
As for what women might bring to Rampage, as well as all the usual stuff, like athleticism, suspense and bravery, you need to look no further than the Barbie-themed custom paint job on Robin’s Yeti SB165. It just feels so right.
