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Video: Flat-bar road bike v Austrian mountain bike downhill

Can a top racer keep a skinny-tyred bike rubber side down?

As Martyn Ashton and friends have proven, skinny-tyred bikes are a lot more capable - in the right hands - than most of us realised. But how do skinny tyres cope with a full-on downhill mountain bike course?

Top Austrian Masters class racer Peter Deppner isn't quite shredding the Semmering downhill track on his Scott flat-bar road bike in this video, but he's hardly hanging about either.

Aside from one minor mechanical hiccup, fixed with a good old set of mark one fingers, Deppner makes it through some pretty hairy sections intact and rubber side down.

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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5 comments

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yespsb | 9 years ago
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nothing short of amazing and I speak as a mountain biker  41

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Tony | 9 years ago
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Drop bars next?

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fukawitribe | 9 years ago
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Genius.

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Mario29 | 9 years ago
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Haha, mental. When he stopped to fix his dropped chain, he realised he has a flat tyre as well...no point in stopping though, is there?  16
Austrian:" Oida, du host koa Luft drinnen" -> "Dude, you've got no air(in your tire)"

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disco | 9 years ago
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Hat off to Peter, I wouldn't of lasted a second. Got the skills and got the humour to do it. Bravo!  4

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