Thirty-five years ago, Ned Overend won the first-ever international Mountain Bike World Championships near his home in Durango, cementing himself as a pioneer of the then-nascent sport. The 1990 World Mountain Bike Championships also established Durango — and, really, North America — as a hotbed for the growing sport.
In 2030, the UCI-sanctioned world championships will return to Durango and Purgatory ski area in a 40-year replay of one of mountain biking’s most influential events.
“Bringing it back to Durango and reliving that early history is getting so many of the young kids in mountain bike racing now to see this was created as an American sport,” said the now 70-year-old Overend, a cycling legend who still races — and often beats — cyclists half his age. “Americans were dominant in 1990, winning world championships in cross-country and downhill. “It’s interesting that the U.S. has been less competitive for a long time after that.”
But just as the 1990 event shifted American-born mountain biking into a higher gear, the 2030 contest could re-spark a growing sport and get even more young people pedaling, Overend said.
“Because so many riders are so young right now, this is a chance for them to learn more about how this sport developed from pretty much nothing in the mid-1980s to UCI-recognized in 1990 and then the Olympics in 1996 and now it’s huge,” Overend said. “There are just so many great opportunities for the sport, for the town and for Colorado with these races coming back to Durango.”
The 2030 contest will mark the fourth time the world championships of mountain biking have been in Colorado. Vail hosted the international showdown in 1994 and 2001. Every time the world’s top mountain bikers have come to Colorado, homegrown athletes have crowded the podium, including legends like Mike Kloser, Sara Ballantyne, Susan DeMattei and Alison Dunlap.
A group of cycling advocates from Durango — home to the 53-year-old Iron Horse Bicycle Classic bike race and a breeding ground for Olympians, Tour de France contenders and the highest caliber bike racers in the world — has spent several years campaigning for the 2030 worlds.
The local effort to land the world championships exemplifies the community-based support for cycling around Durango, where trails spin for hundreds of miles around the town and youth development programs have honed international champions, Overend said.
Too often these big races rely on giant title sponsors that come and go. That’s one reason the state has such a packed cemetery of big bike races. The longevity of the region’s Iron Horse Bicycle Classic is anchored in widespread community support, hundreds of volunteers and a wide array of smaller sponsors, said Overend.
“The worlds will follow that lead,” he said.
The buildup to the five-day event will include a major international race in 2028 — likely a national championship — and a UCI Mountain Bike World Cup event in 2029.
It’s expected the world championships from Aug. 28 through Sept. 1, 2030, will draw 800 competitors from 55 countries racing in cross-country, downhill and even e-mountain bike events. The 2025 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships that just closed two weeks of racing in Valais, Switzerland, had more than 1,200 athletes from 60 nations and drew more than 110,000 spectators.
Kate Rau watched those groundbreaking races at Purgatory in 1990, seeding a lifetime of singletrack pedaling. She recently stepped down from a 16-year career as the founder and executive director of the Colorado High School Cycling League, which grew from about 200 teenage athletes in 2009 to more than 2,000 today.
“The buzz was unbelievable,” Rau said of the 1990 scene at Purgatory, where then-rookie Juli Furtado won the women’s cross-country title on a Yeti with the first-ever carbon-fiber frame. “The energy of innovation … it was zany and very free compared to what we knew about bike racing watching the Tour de France. It felt so American, like we were creating something right there.”
Rau has seen new crops of gifted pedalers erupting from Colorado’s mountain biking scene for years. She wonders: Will today’s knobby-tired superstars from Colorado — like Durango’s Savilia Blunk, Riley Amos and Christopher Blevins and Boulder’s Bjorn Riley — double down on maintaining their prominence as a home-turf world championships looms? Or will the younger set coming up in the shadow of giants usurp their idols? (Sidenote: Watch this Silverton phenom Griff Pinto come in hot for 2030.)
“Either way, Colorado will see names that we recognize in Durango in 2030,” Rau said. “For this to come back to Durango, it’s such a feather in Colorado’s helmet.”