Braking on Corners for Mountain Bike Racers

Video Transcript

"Okay, so through that corner, I did a little bit of braking with my back wheel to sort of brake my back end loose and make the radius of the corner a little bit smaller. So, I did a lot of braking before I got to the corner, after I went over those big roots in the entrance. There's a nice patch of dirt there; real buff and smooth and clean with no pebbles. So I did a lot of braking there with both my front brake and my rear brake. Then, when I got in the corner, to really make it zoom into the corner, I had to do some back braking into the corner. I had to kick out my back end a little bit so I got a better angle on the front tire to make it all the way through. So, this corner down here, I'm going to do all my braking before I get to the corner, and then I'm going to just really focus on angulating down through it. So if you saw it from the back, you probably saw that it looks pretty similar to what I was doing before but there wasn't any dirt coming up and you see the ground is not that disturbed. If I was braking over there in those leaves. And as I ride through this section again, and you see me coming from the front, you'll see that all of my braking is happening before there and I'm not even touching my brakes as I go through this section. So, I'm making sure I'm clipped in. I'm looking nice and far ahead, starting my braking now, then just leaning over and I'm off the brakes. So, I mean, because of how far ahead we're trying to look when we ride, even though I was twenty yards away, up that hill, I was still looking through the corner. If you could see my face, as soon as I was off the brakes, I was looking all the way down there. So we do our braking in our straight lines so that our tires can do what they are designed to do the most when we are cornering. So that's two different types of corners, and two different ways of braking. "