Just nine women and 20 men lined up in Switzerland last week to contest the official UCI rainbow jersey races for the (supposedly) coveted e-MTB Cross Country World Championship titles, while just eight women and 23 men duelled it out for the official UCI E-MTB Enduro title races. They’re statistics that both disappoint, and make me feel a tad uneasy about the status of these power-assisted events considering the lack of popularity we’re seeing so far.
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First up, I don’t own an e-bike of any sort and have only ever ridden a few laps of a field on an early prototype e-MTB at a demo day years ago. That said, I would like to own one at some point, and unlike many traditional cyclists, I’d happily embrace one into my bike room – if I could warrant the hefty price tag vs usage of decent e-bikes.
Why? Personally, I can see countless benefits to e-bikes, for all kinds of riders – for practicality, to enable others to ride with you, or vice versa, for those days you just don’t feel like the slog, during periods of injury, and so much more. Though I’ve been on the fence when it comes to racing them in cross-country for a while. I’ve written a couple of e-MTB features here debating the competitive side of things and have noted the very low start numbers at the World Champs for some time now, slightly rosy-eyed and with a long, drawn-out sense of optimism when it came to any potential future uptake in numbers, which has certainly not happened, far from it.
When watching the e-Enduro World Championship races last week, I had to admit it was fun, with a few top-quality riders at the head of affairs – riders who could easily stand their own ground in any un-assisted enduro too. In with that, I absolutely applaud the amazing bronze medal ride of our own Tracy Moseley, who at 46 is one of the oldest elite MTB racers competing today. I think she may even have won had she not made an error or two on the day.
However, when you look at the numbers, it’s disappointing, not least for the medallists, who deserve the bling. With WBD dropping the discipline from the World Series, I guess that didn’t help the e-enduro cause, although I think it would be fair to say, the powers that be haven’t been championing enduro as much as they could have for a long time.
With enduro, I do feel e-MTB racing has its place, and would have hoped that with the industry obviously pushing high price tag e-bikes (maybe also part of the low numbers) that it would have boomed. Entry barriers, lack of races or not, it’s still a little surprising that more attention and take-up haven’t materialised over the past few years. Will it ever? I don’t know, I hope so, but so far there is little evidence at the championship level.
As for e-XC, when it first came to the 2019 World Championships, it almost felt like a bit of a novelty, a pointless yet fun and experimental race. It started with a bang, with many of the biggest XC stars of past and present duelling it out, from the veteran XC Olympic Champ Miguel Martínez to the then up-and-coming and now multiple Olympic champion Tom Pidcock. It was somewhat interesting to watch too – the future looked bright.
Sadly, it seems it has proven to be a one-hit wonder, one that soon slipped right down the charts. Why? Hard to say, but I guess people just couldn’t see the point of it as a serious championship race. Plus there’s the whole conundrum of power outputs/weight management etc, which I fully appreciate makes it a tough one.
Back to watching the 2025 E-MTB XC races – while the start numbers were somewhat farcical for World title races, I have to admit that I think that a handful of the men, and some of the lead women, would not look out of place in elite XCO races; sadly, behind them, ahem… things dropped off rapidly, and this was most evident in the men’s race due to the bigger field. It certainly won’t help the image of the sport, to cyclists and outsiders.
To be brutally honest, it looked to me like many of the riders outside of the first few looked like they’d ridden in from a Sunday pub ride, pootling around Cannock Chase. Perhaps e-MTB XC, even enduro racing, needs its own stage outside the UCI umbrella to stand a chance of taking off?
