Latest Jonathan ellsworth Podcast Episodes
Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer, March 2024
Bikes & Big Ideas - April 11, 2024 17:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsMarch was an interesting month for bike news. There was a dispute at Crankworx Rotorua which resulted in the men not competing in the finals, Scott is having crazy management drama, there are a bunch of interesting new lightweight eMTBs, and Simon had a recent trip to ride in Tuscany. In our thi...
Brook Macdonald on Fresh Starts, DH Race Bike Design, Moving to Forbidden, & More
Bikes & Big Ideas - April 04, 2024 16:05 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsRacing World Cup DH isn’t easy under any circumstances, but doing so after a spinal cord injury — and needing to relearn how to walk, much less ride — is something else entirely. Brook Macdonald pulled it off, but he’s also struggled with bike setup, burnout, and more over the last couple of sea...
Georgia Astle on Racing, Freeriding, & Finding Her Way to MTB
Bikes & Big Ideas - March 28, 2024 16:50 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsGeorgia Astle is one of the many ultra-talented riders to come out of Whistler, BC — but she actually grew up kitesurfing and doing a whole bunch of other sports, rather than mountain biking. Once she fell in love with mountain biking in high school, though, her rise through the ranks was astoni...
Dakotah Norton on Finding Consistency, Moving to Mondraker, the State of US DH Racing, & More
Bikes & Big Ideas - March 21, 2024 16:22 - 45 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsDakotah Norton finished the 2023 DH season strong, with two podiums and a 6th place finish over the final four races, but as he put it, the season started with “near failure.” We sat down with Dakotah to talk about the struggle of finding consistency at the limit; his move to Mondraker Factory R...
Sarah Sturm on Her Unconventional Path to Gravel-Racing Stardom
Bikes & Big Ideas - March 14, 2024 16:20 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsGravel racing has exploded in recent years and Sarah Sturm — who only started racing bikes in college, after burning out on competitive soccer — quickly vaulted to stardom in the sport. So we sat down with Sarah to hear the surprising and hilarious story of her path into gravel racing; chat abou...
Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer, February 2024
Bikes & Big Ideas - March 07, 2024 19:15 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsOn our second episode of Reviewing The News with hosts Simon Stewart and Ryan Palmer; Ryan may have uncovered what Kyle and Rachael Strait are keeping secret before their big announcement on Friday (March 8th); Simon considers adopting Ronan Dunne’s pre-race hydration program after watching his ...
Norco on their New High-Pivot Optic and Sight
Bikes & Big Ideas - February 29, 2024 16:33 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsHigh-pivot bikes are becoming increasingly common but they’re still mostly reserved for longer-travel Enduro and DH models. Given that, Norco’s decision to move their 150mm-travel Sight and especially the 125mm-travel Optic to that layout was arguably a bit of a surprise — and it wasn’t one Norc...
Ed Masters on Hardline, the 2024 Race Landscape, Pivot’s Prototype DH Bike, & More
Bikes & Big Ideas - February 22, 2024 16:28 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsThe first Tasmanian edition of Red Bull Hardline is coming up, so we sat down with Ed Masters to talk about the event, building and testing the course, and getting prepared to ride it. Along the way, we talk about Pivot’s wild prototype DH bike, the state of Enduro and DH racing in general, Ed’s...
Continental on Designing, Developing, & Testing Their Overhauled Tire Lineup
Bikes & Big Ideas - February 15, 2024 16:44 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsContinental’s overhauled gravity tire lineup has had a lot of success, both on the World Cup Downhill circuit and with everyday riders (we’ve personally been huge fans of the Kryptotals). It’s a big departure from their prior offerings, with 5 new tread patterns to go with overhauled casings a...
Reviewer Reports: Nicolai Nucleon Supre Drive, Ibis HD6, & More
Bikes & Big Ideas - February 08, 2024 15:22 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsBlister reviewer Zack Henderson makes his Bikes & Big Ideas debut to talk with David Golay about a bunch of the bikes they’ve been testing, including the Nicolai Nucleon 16 Supre Drive, Ibis HD6, and Chromag Lowdown (and they tease some other upcoming reviews that they can’t yet talk about in de...
Reviewing The News w/ Ryan Palmer (January 2024)
Bikes & Big Ideas - February 01, 2024 17:15 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsSimon Stewart is joined by bike industry veteran, Ryan Palmer, to kick off the inaugural bike-focused edition of Reviewing the News. Ryan and Simon tuck into what happened to Greg Minaar and Santa Cruz; Mondraker’s new focus on the U.S market and their stacked World Cup DH Team; the state of th...
Rónán Dunne on Joining Mondraker Factory Racing
Bikes & Big Ideas - January 25, 2024 20:25 - 36 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsMoving up to Elite Downhill racing from Juniors is hard, but Rónán Dunne made that leap in 2021, and promptly started getting great results — despite only racing a handful of World Cups as a Junior and never even making it out of qualifying. After three strong years racing for Nukeproof, Rónán h...
Outbound Lighting on Night Riding, Light Design, & More
Bikes & Big Ideas - January 19, 2024 02:07 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsThere are a lot of good reasons to try mountain biking at night, from simple necessity during the colder, darker months to seeking a new challenge and experience. We sat down with Outbound Lighting’s Tom Place to make the case for (safe) night riding, talk about light design, how to think about ...
RAAW Bikes Founder Ruben Torenbeek
Bikes & Big Ideas - January 11, 2024 16:34 - 58 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsWhen Ruben Torenbeek founded RAAW back in 2016, he had a clear vision for the sort of dependable, no-nonsense bikes he wanted to build. He clearly wasn’t alone in wanting a bike in that vein, because RAAW is going strong with an expanding model lineup, a bigger team, and so on. So Ruben and Da...
Vorsprung’s New Coil Shock & Development Process
Bikes & Big Ideas - January 04, 2024 16:53 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsVorsprung Suspension has been making a wide range of suspension upgrade products for quite some time now — and we’ve been very impressed with a number of them — but they’ve yet to offer a full standalone fork or shock. That’s about to change. So we sat down with founder and engineer Steve Mathe...
Gear of the Year (2023)
Bikes & Big Ideas - December 28, 2023 16:52 - 39 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsWe got the gang back together to recap a whole bunch of the bikes and other gear we tested in 2023, and Simon Stewart, Dylan Wood, and David Golay picked a bunch of our favorites, including bikes across the travel spectrum and a variety of softgoods. Along the way, we get into bike design and ge...
Forbidden Bikes Founder Owen Pemberton
Bikes & Big Ideas - December 21, 2023 16:38 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsForbidden might be *the* company most closely associated with high-pivot bikes, but Owen Pemberton didn’t set out with that goal in mind when he founded the company. We sat down with Owen to hear all about his journey through the bike industry, including a long tenure as an engineer at Norco; fo...
EXT’s Franco Fratton on the History, Basics, & Details of MTB Suspension
Bikes & Big Ideas - December 14, 2023 20:31 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsEXT founder Franco Fratton has more experience working on suspension than just about anyone, and today, we’re revisiting our first conversation with him that kicked off our “Very Deep Dive on Suspension” series, where we discuss all the details when it comes to suspension design and tech. RELAT...
Tool on Their Radical Machined High-Pivot Bike
Bikes & Big Ideas - December 07, 2023 15:58 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsWilliam Boisvert made his first bike frame — a machined front triangle for a Devinci Troy — in just seven weeks for a college project, and despite the challenges that arose (and the fact that that first frame didn’t survive very long), he’s continued the development of a CNC-machined high-pivot ...
Albatross Bikes on the Super-Adaptable Apogee Module
Bikes & Big Ideas - November 30, 2023 16:44 - 46 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsA lot of companies have offered bikes with a degree of adaptability in their geometry and travel configurations, but the Albatross Apogee Module is a very novel design that opens up a much wider spectrum of options than most. We sat down with founder and engineer, Will Hilgenberg, to chat about ...
Katy Winton on Burnout, Recovery, & Returning to Racing
Bikes & Big Ideas - November 23, 2023 16:54 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsTwo races into the 2022 EWS season, Katy Winton hit a breaking point and pulled out of the rest of the series to give herself the time and space she needed to get her mental health back on track. Having made a successful return to racing in 2023, Katy is now ready to open up about the experience...
Cornelius Kapfinger on Founding Intend, Inverted Forks, and Doing Things Differently
Bikes & Big Ideas - November 16, 2023 16:28 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsFounding Intend (2:18) Fork design & the first Intend offering (5:24) Why inverted? (7:09) Selling inverted forks & market acceptance of things that look different (8:52) Designing a full fork (17:16) Damper design (20:16) The Infinity EN (24:42) The Bandit (38:32) The Hover shock (43:12...
Neko Mulally on Selling the Frameworks DH Bike, Signing Asa Vermette, and More
Bikes & Big Ideas - November 09, 2023 16:00 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsNeko Mulally’s Frameworks project has drawn a lot of well-deserved attention, and now he’s opening pre-orders for the production version of his World Cup DH race bike. So we sat down with Neko to hear all about everything that’s gone into the development of the bike this season; his experimentat...
Lachlan Morton on the Tour Divide Record, Bears, Payday Bars, & More
Bikes & Big Ideas - November 02, 2023 14:49 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsThe stats of the Tour Divide route — 2,670 miles and 192,000 feet of climbing, mostly on dirt — are imposing, and Lachlan Morton just covered it in a record-setting 12 days, 12 hours, and 21 minutes. So we sat down with him to hear about what it takes to plan, prepare for, and execute such a wil...
Contra Bikes on Making the MC a Reality
Bikes & Big Ideas - October 26, 2023 14:57 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsThe Contra MC — a US-made, steel, high-pivot Enduro bike — is an ambitious project by any measure, and designing and prototyping the bike is just half the battle. So we brought Evan Turpen, the driving force behind Contra, back on the show to talk about refining a prototype design and knowing wh...
Privateer Bikes on the 141 and 161 V2
Bikes & Big Ideas - October 19, 2023 15:31 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsPrivateer has been working on the second-generation versions of their 141 and 161 bikes for three years now, and Dan Hicks, the engineer behind the project, has a ton to share about the thought process behind the updates and bike design in general — and does a great job of explaining all of it. ...
Casey Brown, Vaea Verbeeck, and Hannah Bergemann on Women at Rampage
Bikes & Big Ideas - October 12, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsWhen it was announced that Red Bull Formation wasn’t happening in 2023, there was a lot of hopeful speculation that, in its place, there would be women competing at Rampage for the first time. But that didn’t happen either, so we sat down with three of the top freeriders in the world — Casey Bro...
Reviewer Reports: Contra MC vs. Trek Slash, Santa Cruz Heckler SL, REEB Steezl, & More
Bikes & Big Ideas - October 05, 2023 15:16 - 45 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsSimon Stewart, Dylan Wood, and David Golay sat down to talk about a bunch of the bikes they’ve been testing lately, from the short-travel Cannondale Habit to the very not short-travel Canfield One.2 Super Enduro; some eMTBs including the new Santa Cruz Heckler SL; a head-to-head comparison of hi...
Archibald Cycles on Canadian Manufacturing & the Wild AC1
Bikes & Big Ideas - September 28, 2023 15:47 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsHigh-pivot bikes are having a moment. Mullet bikes and steel full-suspension frames are too. And while gearbox mountain bikes haven’t achieved widespread popularity (yet?) they’ve got their ardent supporters. The Archibald Cycles AC1 brings all those elements together in a Canadian-made Trail / ...
Sklar Bikes: A Custom Builder’s Shift to “Mass” Production
Bikes & Big Ideas - September 21, 2023 15:44 - 45 minutes ★★★★★ - 118 ratingsIt’s rare for a small but well-established custom bike builder to make the leap to overseas-built production bikes, but Adam Sklar has done just that. While it might be easy to romanticize the idea of a custom hand-built bike made by a single builder, Adam speaks very openly about the ways runni...
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