For Female Bike Riders, 'This Is All We Wanted'

The "biggest and gnarliest" of all mountain bike competitions is the annual Red Bull Rampage in the Utah desert, reports the New York Times. And this year, for the first time since its inception in 2001, women competed, too. "Women are in Rampage now," says 39-year-old rider and advocate Katie Holden. "This is all we wanted." In the competition near Zion National Park, New Zealander Katie Groomes won the $100,000 prize, the same amount doled out in the men's competition that followed. "Her run—punctuated by two flawless backflips, several huge drops, and steep, technical riding—set the tone," writes Abigail Barronian at Outside.

Competitors in the iconic free-riding event have the same start and finish line, but they navigate their own way down over jumps, twists, and cliffs. The Times notes that nobody has ever died in the competition, but a male rider was paralyzed years ago and another needed to be choppered out of this year's race because of multiple broken ribs and a collapsed lung. "Danger did not stop women from wanting to participate," writes John Branch of the Times. "Just the opposite." And in her first-person essay at Outside, Barronian writes that she was "incredibly heartened" to see the change. "The fact that it took until 2024 to create a women's division is still a little hard to believe." See video highlights of the women's competition here and the men's competition here. (More mountain biking stories.)