The UCI Killed Enduro. Honestly? Good.

Ben Haselden -

So the UCI's pulled the pin on the Enduro World Cup after 2026. Fourteen years, done. World Champs sticks around, apparently, but the actual world series — the thing that made enduro enduro is getting put down like a lame horse behind the woolshed.

And look, I know I'm meant to be sad about this. Everyone's writing their little eulogies, Jesse Melamed's out here posting "this is good" on his story like the rest of us aren't grieving. But he's not wrong. He's just early to admitting it.

Because here's the thing nobody at the UCI wants to hear: they ruined it themselves.

You Can't Commercialise a Campfire

Enduro was never meant to be a product. It started as blokes and sheilas riding stages between beers, timing the downs and not the ups, because that's the bit that actually mattered. It was grassroots in the truest sense, mud on it, dirt under the nails, a bit of chaos in the startlist. That was the whole point.

Then the UCI turned up wanting to package it. Slap a World Cup jersey on it. Sell broadcast rights to Warner Bros like it's the Tour de France with more travel insurance claims. And you can't do that to something whose entire soul is "we just want to ride our bikes, mate." The second you try to turn a scene into a spreadsheet, you lose the thing that made the spreadsheet worth building in the first place.

The riders never signed up to be commercial furniture. They signed up because riding a bike as fast as humanly possible down a mountain, with your mates, for a laugh, is one of the best feelings on earth. Sponsorship, sure, that's the deal, that's fine, that's how you afford to not have a real job. But turning the athletes themselves into content assets for a streaming platform? That was never the agreement. No wonder the factory teams bailed and the privateers went broke trying to keep up appearances for a circus that didn't actually want them there for who they were.

It Was Still the Best Show in Cycling

Whatever the UCI did to the business of it, they never managed to ruin the racing itself, and that's worth saying loudly. Enduro at its best is still the single greatest display of bike control and raw athleticism cycling has ever produced. XC is an engine room. DH is a bullet fired down a hill. Enduro is both, back to back to back, six stages deep, on a bike that has no business doing either job as well as it does and somehow it does both, brilliantly, because the format forced the bikes and the riders to get absurdly good at everything at once.

Watching someone like Rude or Moimoi thread a rock garden they've seen once, at race pace, after already pedalling for forty minutes to get there, and then do it again four more times before lunch there's nothing else in the sport that asks that much of a human and a bicycle simultaneously. That's not going away just because the World Cup banner does. I hope.

The Froth It Caused Was Real

Say what you want about the commercial mess, but enduro is directly responsible for an entire generation of young riders going feral for mountain biking in a way XC and DH never quite managed on their own. It was accessible enough to dream about, you didn't need to be a genetic freak, you needed guts and a decent bike and wild enough to make every grom in NZ want to be Sam Hill's protégé by Saturday.

And the bikes. Good lord, the bikes. Enduro didn't just influence bike design, it detonated it. We went from XC-adjacent trail bikes to 160-170mm travel weapons that pedal like a hardtail and descend like a DH rig, mullet setups, geometry numbers that would've been laughable a decade ago, suspension platforms nobody thought you'd need outside a bike park. No other discipline, not DH, not XC, not gravel, nothing. Nothing has pushed bike category evolution anywhere near as hard or as fast as enduro did. Your local trail bike today is basically a watered-down enduro race bike from 2018. That's the legacy, whether the UCI wants credit for it or not.

Why It Needs to Come Back

It needs to come back because there's a hole now where the best format in the sport used to live, and "local enduro racing" isn't going to cut it for the riders who want to test themselves against the best in the world, not just the best in their region.

How It Actually Comes Back

Not the way the UCI ran it. That model's dead and it should stay dead. If enduro's going to return properly, it needs to look more like the old EWS than the World Cup circus that replaced it:

  • Rider-run, not federation-run. Let the athletes and organisers who actually understand the discipline control the format, not a governing body trying to cram it into a broadcast slot built for road racing.
  • Fewer, better venues. Go back to the destinations that made EWS special. Proper trips, proper trails, proper communities hosting it instead of chasing whatever's cheapest to film.
  • Amateur categories baked in, not bolted on. Part of what made it grassroots was that mid-pack randoms could race the same stages as the pros on the same weekend. That's the connection to the fanbase the UCI never figured out how to sell.
  • Let sponsorship stay sponsorship. Brands backing riders they believe in, not a league trying to sell the riders themselves as the product.

Basically: shrink it back down to human scale, hand it back to people who actually ride, and stop trying to make it something it was never meant to be.

The UCI tried to turn a campfire into a stadium tour and wondered why everyone stopped showing up. Give it back to the people who lit the fire in the first place, and I reckon it comes back stronger than ever.

What's your take — good riddance to the World Cup format, or a genuine loss for the sport? Keen to hear it.