The Free-riding Oxymoron

Author: Professor Goat, B.S. PhD. (Bull Shit Piled High & Deep)

Here on Canada's east coast, as winter gives way to spring, which in turn gives way to more winter with a brief splotch of summer in between, the time has come for a frank discussion about a peculiar form of lunacy known as "Free-Riding". However, since my name isn't Frank, you won't find that here. What you will find is rumours, half truths, sarcasm, outright lies and some gratuitous nudity (a consolation prize for the lot of you who stumbled upon this while you were looking for eatme.com instead of ecmtb.com).

First off, let's deal with the sort of person who engages in "Free-Riding". It's an activity enjoyed by a special kind of idiot, the type who equates the height of his last wheelie drop with the size of his testicles and gruesome crashes with style. Yes, it's all about the kind of fellow who finds that flinging his bicycle off a 20 foot high rock is twice as enjoyable as flinging it off a 10 foot high one. The thrill of the moment. The mastery of new skills. The crippling pain as your ass falls asleep while you watch the 30 other twits that you're out with jump off of shabby wooden ramps. Does it get any better than that? Not according to most squirrels. Survey results indicate that 9 out of 10 say it's the best entertainment they've had in years; 1 out of 10 indicated that playing with their nuts was slightly more amusing.

In an effort to understand the method behind this madness, a brief description of the various aspects of "Free-Riding" follows. For the benefit of those illiterates who enjoyed "North Shore Extreme" or own a VPS, I've hired an orangutang to grunt it out for you. Be nice to her, she's single.
So, just what is "Free-Riding" anyway? Probably, the best place to start is by examining what it's not. The first thing that it's not, is free. A "Free-Ride" bike isn't free; a "Free-Ride" bike is very expensive.

This brings me to my second point. "Free-Riders" have considerable difficulty freeing themselves from gravity. This is entirely due to the fact that their shiny, obscenely expensive "Free" bicycles have roughly the same gross tonnage as Roseanne Barr. I can see the extra-glossy full page advertisements in Dirt-Rag now: "Feel the freedom as you drag your Kona Cinderblock to the top of the next cliff, where you collapse in a pool of your own sweat for 3 years while trying to regain the strength to push it over the edge!" Liberating indeed. As it turns out, the impoverished nations would be far better off to scrape up the pennies to buy Roseanne Barr instead of the Free-Ride bike. Even though they couldn't lift either, at least they could eat Roseanne, providing a neat solution for at least two global problems: hunger and lousy television.

Finally, the conscientious objector must take issue with the inclusion of the "Riding" portion of "Free Riding". There's very little actual riding. What there is much more of, is standing around watching other people trying to kill themselves by launching their bikes off the highest obstacles available. It's a bit like watching a snuff movie without the Christian Fundamentalists, organized labour, or Bolivian Guerrillas.

To conclude, we've established that "Free-Riding" isn't free and that it doesn’t involve much riding. What, then, is it? As poetry is often an effective tool for revealing truth, perhaps this modest selection of Haiku’s will capture the essence of the matter. For the poetry layman in the audience, a Haiku consists of 3 lines of text with 5, 7 and 5 syllables per line, respectively:

On Free-Riding

this bike weighs too much
to be ridden anywhere
it’s about style

inches of travel
bridge the drops every time
you travel nowhere

does it ever hurt
an endo done escaping
hungry africans

those cross country guys
what a bunch of big sissies
way too much spandex

what is free riding
trials on a downhill bike
good marketing ploy

meaningless labels
have a good ride with your friends
nothing else matters

The views above are purely editorial and do not necessarily reflect the views of ecmtb.com.

Posted by nimzie at April 14, 2003 07:25 PM

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