The Most Dangerous Event in Mountain Biking Is Finally Including Women. What Took So Long?

Chelsea Kimball knew she wanted to get into free ride mountain biking after she made a jump she didn’t land. During the US mountain biker’s first trip to Virgin, UT, in 2017, Kimball hit a big step up — a jump with a landing that’s higher than the take-off — when she was still new to the trail feature. “Definitely didn’t have the skills,” she tells PS. “I crashed so hard. I flew from 20 feet out of the air, straight over the bars. I got bucked and just landed like a pancake on the ground.”

Free ride mountain biking is premised not on racing to a finish, but on riders charging courses they create themselves, using natural elements like rocks, logs, and dirt. These DIY courses draw out steep drops and big jumps, which in turn demand commitment. Kimball felt scared committing to that early step up in Virgin, but she liked the feeling. “Whether it goes well or not, that feeling of completing something new —- of venturing into the unknown, and then finishing it and coming out on the other side —- is what has always drawn me to free ride,” Kimball says.

This fall, Kimball will be one of eight riders from five countries to venture into the unknown in Virgin, UT, to experience a first for women’s free riding: Red Bull Rampage. Since 2001, the event has taken place along the red rock cliffs that form Virgin’s desert mesas. Over the years, Rampage has become known as the most extreme event in free riding, in mountain biking, and to some, in all of action sports. And in all 17 previous Rampages, only men were invited to ride.

In October 2024, that’ll change: Red Bull Rampage will feature its first ever women’s roster — the product of a five-year push led by Katie Holden, a former downhill racer, a member of the free ride community for more than a decade, and a longtime advocate for women in the sport.

Why Women Were Left Off the Rampage Stage — and How That Changed

Katie Holden first attended Rampage as a spectator in 2010. She found the event terrifying and intriguing, and became “enamored with the whole thing,” she tells PS. She knew she wanted to be a part of it.

But at the time, in order to qualify for Rampage, women had to get past a global pool of male applicants. And few believed that even a handful of women — let alone their own roster — could ride Rampage-style lines in Virgin at all, Holden remembers. “Rampage is not a proving ground,” the event’s co-founder, Todd Barber, told Outside in 2018.

Back then, women weren’t getting invited to any of the big free ride events or video projects, nor were they featured much in bike marketing, says free rider Hannah Bergemann, who qualified for Rampage but won’t ride at this year’s event due to injury.

All that didn’t keep Holden from eyeing Virgin’s mesas for a new kind of event, though. And in 2019, after she — and other women, like veteran Canadian rider Casey Brown — had spent years trying to qualify for Rampage without success, she co-founded Formation, a women’s free ride event hosted at a former Rampage site in Virgin, UT.

Holden worked with Red Bull and cyclist Rebecca Rusch to develop the event as a form of proof of concept for Rampage. The event brought six riders to Virgin, gave them an outlet for progression, and showcased their ability. “We really just threw them in the deep end,” Holden says. “I completely believed in them and knew that if we gave them the opportunity to ride out there and to have digging support and media resources — if that was in place, I had no doubt in my mind that they would rise to the occasion and show everyone what was possible.”

And that they did. The women went from digging their very first courses, or lines, out of Virgin dirt and riding them in the event’s first year, to reviving Rampage lines, top to bottom, by the event’s third year. “It’s hard to quantify or explain exactly how much progression happened between those three years,” Bergemann says. “It was pretty insane. Just from dipping our toes in, to riding a few features, to building these full Rampage lines. The line that Casey Brown and I rode in our third year of Formation was the same line Brett Rheeder rode in his Rampage run. He won with that line.”

In Formation’s three iterations, from 2019 to 2022, the event helped women prove to themselves not only that they were capable of sending lines on Virgin’s exposed cliffs, but that they could call themselves free riders and make progress for a field with a history of low industry visibility.

For Kimball, whose free riding often had to come second to her downhill racing career, Formation changed everything. It was the first high-level event that funneled resources — cameras, drones, the works —- toward women focusing on free ride. “How Formation presented free ride was huge, because so many people saw women out there for the first time,” she says.

But riding in Formation also presented women with pressure, especially in its first year. “All these women are so capable out there, but it felt like we had to make it perfect,” Holden says. “Perfect in every way, to show the women they were capable. No one could get hurt. Everything had to be perfectly aligned for this to carry into the future and for the industry to get behind it, which happened. But not a single woman even crashed in Formation 2019, which is wild.”

Holden and Formation’s riders were up against a kind of apprehension they’ve encountered not just within the industry, but from family, friends, and other athletes — men and women alike: the fear of seeing women in high-risk, high-reward situations. “Guys get hurt all the time, and for whatever reason, people are scared for a woman to fall or get injured,” Holden says. “It evokes a different emotion. And as a result of that emotion, people make decisions. That feeling — that people are protective of women in some way — that somehow closes a lot of doors, which blows my mind.”

Vaea Verbeeck, a three-time Formation rider from British Columbia who will ride at Rampage in 2024, has a response to that lingering resistance to risk. “Objectively, these are mountain bike riders,” she says. “Doesn’t matter if they’re male or female. As a rider, you’re going to do you, you’re going to push yourself, and then it’s going to turn into something like Rampage. You’re going to take a risk and probably crash and tumble, and you’re going to get up and do it again.”

After three years of Formation, it became clear that women were capable of riding at Rampage, even if they had yet to bring out the tricks performed by men. The mountain biking community became restless to see it happen, with voices in Outside, Bike Mag, and Pink Bike calling Red Bull out for the holdup. Then, the call finally came, breaking the news to Holden that women would join Rampage in 2024. “I got off the phone, and it sounds so dramatic, but I pretty much cried for two days,” she says. “It was the grindiest, hardest thing I’ve done in my entire life.”

By finally making it onto the Rampage stage, the women are leaving a “suspended space” as athletes, Holden says. “If you don’t have that target, you don’t have that recognition, you don’t have that potential to earn that prize money, and you don’t have the opportunities or industry support — financially or otherwise — to grow and develop, to reach for something,” she says. “Once you have a target, it doesn’t solve all the problems, but it creates an actual path to really move things forward. So yeah, it’s just an event, but it just means so much more than that.”

With women finally in Rampage, the riders of the first roster are excited to see what happens with their sport on the whole in the next few years. The sport’s professionalism will rise, Kimball says, as Rampage represents a serious bargaining chip in negotiations with sponsors.

And beyond Rampage, the collaborative energy of Formation is expanding, with riders creating their own events: Kimball created Desert Days in Virgin, UT, while Bergemann created Hang Time in Bellingham, Washington. “At Formation, we were sharing meals and connecting, and I’m really close friends with all those girls to this day,” Bergemann says. “Building our community — like a strong foundation — is super important to just accomplishing our goals in our sport.”

Suzie Hodges is a freelance writer drawn to stories in outdoor and action sports, environmental conservation, and science. In addition to PS, her work has appeared in Atlas Obscura, Blue Ridge Outdoors, Smithsonian magazine, and The Daily Beast. Previously, she was a writer at an environmental conservation organization called Rare and at the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.