Opinion: Nobody is Talking About 1 of the Most Interesting Team Moves of the Winter

Words: Matt Wragg

Every year when silly season arrives, the same joke gets wheeled out: XXX is signing for Huffy. Or Raleigh, or Carrera, or, here in France, Rockrider.

As Serious Mountain Bikers we look down on these brands and the people who buy these bikes. After all, they make bikes for people who maybe don’t have the money or desire to spend five figures on a bike. People who only want to get from point A to point B. Maybe they want something to teach their child to ride on and don’t want to spend €1,100 on a titanium and carbon balance bike, the fools. They probably don’t even know their fork offset.

We forget that most of us probably learned to ride on bikes like the ones these brands make. I did. My brother did, all of the guys I grew up riding with did.

So when it comes to transfer season, some wit always wheels out the tried and trusted joke. Except for this year, the person wheeling that joke was, errr… Rockrider. Amidst all the team move turbulence, Stephane Tempier signed for Rockrider.


As an English-speaking website, it is understandable that we missed the news. After all, Rockrider is a French brand and they pulled a classic French move and forgot that there are MTB media outside France. While the guys at Velovert have both digital and print features on the move, here at Pinkbike we don’t appear to have even received a press release, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t interesting.

Of course, you may now be wondering why we should care about this move. You need to think about scale. If you are a regular in the Pinkbike comments section, you will probably have read much about the evil machinations of MTB multinationals like Trek or Specialized. Yet a quick Dun and Bradstreet search will show you that Trek sales come to around $719 million per year, while Rockriders’ parent company, Decathlon, take $6.54 billion per year.

The thing is, Rockrider aren’t just supporting a rider, they are building a program. Tempier has had some decent results, although much like his southern French compatriot, Florian Nicolai, he too struggled for form on a Trek program. There is a clutch of young riders, with Joshua Dubau looking like a highlight. If you watched the men's Elite race at the CX Worlds last in January, you may remember his gutsy attempt to take the race to Pidcock, Iserbyt, and co. They have backroom staff drafted in from the big French road racing teams and Olympic gold medalist, Julie Bresset, as a consultant.

If you are not clear on what a massive influx of money can do to a sport, we just need to cast a quick eye towards road cycling. While many people will give you many answers as to why Team Sky/Ineos was so dominant in the last decade, there is one answer that people maybe overlook because it is as simple as it is ugly: money. Ineos outspent their rivals by an order of magnitude and Tour de France victory after victory followed. That is why the comparison between Trek and Decathlon is important - if they decided to, and we've no indication they have, Decathlon has the resources to truly shift the playing field in World Cup racing.


This isn’t a blind swing, either. For the last couple of years, Rockrider has quietly been sponsoring national-level riders of various disciplines here in France and the new team marks a gear change for their ambitions.

The next question is the why, and the answer is twofold. Firstly, as we all know, mountain biking is booming right now. Secondly, the Olympic games are in Paris in 2024. The chance to be a French brand with a French rider fighting for a gold medal on home soil was too good to pass for them. While here on Pinkbike we tend to skew towards the DH, it is worth remembering that the TV value of the Olympic finals is many orders of magnitude more valuable to a brand than an entire year of the Red Bull live feed.

After the Grundig boom of the late 90s, we saw an exodus of mainstream brands from the sport. Today, while it is cool to see Reece Wilson running a Volvo helmet, it is not the same scale of engagement as when they were title sponsors for the Cannondale team. This looks like a tentative first taste for a mainstream brand coming back into the sport - the question will be whether our sport can offer enough to keep them here. In the past, the problem was the brands saw a shockingly poor return on investment, so this might be an acid test for others who are sitting on the sidelines, watching.

Sadly this all means that the comment section comedians will need a new joke for this winter.

Posted In:
Industry News Racing Rumours Stephane Tempier