On the weekend of April 26 and April 27, Taiwan’s national championship downhill mountain bike races were held in Greater Kaohsiung at Dapingding (大坪頂). Before a sparse crowd of fans, friends, and family, riders from around the country tried to find the fastest line down a short course of jumps, banked turns and natural obstacles, with the winning times clocking in at just under a minute.
Downhill mountain biking has quietly been on the rise in Taiwan since the first formal bike race in the country’s history was held at Dakeng (大坑) in the Greater Taichung area 15 years ago. It was just over a half decade ago that the handful of downhill riders from around Taiwan started moving beyond the online forums where they congregate to chat about their favorite sport and ride together in larger groups. Though still far outside the mainstream, riders such as Dan Chiang (江勝山), 20, who blew away the competition on the men’s side by as much as six seconds at this year’s event, are helping to bring downhill riding to a moderate level of prominence. But it has a long way to go.
“Mountain bike racing is not popular in Taiwan. People don’t understand this sport, so they think it’s dangerous and view it as an alternative sport,” Chiang says.
Photo Courtesy of Ian Chu
GROWING SPORT
Nevertheless, there are several loosely organized and informal downhill riding groups around the nation, with the Northern Taiwan Off-Road crew (北台灣OFF-ROAD團) boasting about 1,500 members online. Of that membership, around 40 to 50 men and women ride regularly. Chiang, somewhat of a poster boy for the Taiwan downhill scene, often rides with the group at Danfeng Mountain (丹鳳山), overlooking the Guandu Plain and the Tamsui River (淡水河) mouth in Taipei’s Beitou District. That’s when he’s not taking part in the irregular races organized around Taiwan, or competing overseas in places as far away as Whistler, British Columbia, where he placed 5th in the junior division of the Canadian Open Downhill competition in 2013.
Chiang is also a full-time sport science student at the University of Taipei (臺北市立大學), where gymnastics classes prepare him for the inevitable falls that are a staple of his adrenaline-fueled sport of choice. Knowing how to crash correctly is a vital component of overcoming the fear that comes with hurtling down a mountainside at 40 kilometers per hour or more. Chiang’s contemporary on the women’s side of the sport in Taiwan, Penny Chou (周佩霓), a two-time gold medalist at the Asian Mountain Bike Continental Championships, knows all about that fear and how to control it.
“When I’m on an unfamiliar track,” says the 30-year-old Greater Kaohsiung born and raised rider, “I may be afraid, but practicing over and over again makes me get used to it. Every time I start, I control my breathing and relax. That makes me confident.”
WATCH THOSE WHEELIES
Both Chiang and Chou speak not only of the mental and physical challenges of downhill mountain biking, but also of those associated with gaining broader acceptance for the sport in Taiwan. Compared to the riders who first started breaking away from the mainstream, that is using a bike for any purpose other than getting from point A to point B, they’ve got it easy.
Yamoon Huang (黃英明), 51, got his start in extreme forms of cycling about 35 years ago when he began ripping around on a bike with dual rear-suspension system, somewhat like a motocross bike without the engine. He took up downhill riding about six years ago, and is now a certified coach. Huang remembers a time when performing even the most basic stunt on a bike was condemned by Taiwanese society.
“When I was a kid, doing a wheelie was unacceptable anywhere by anybody,” he says, adding that getting caught doing such a rudimentary trick, involving nothing more than lifting the front wheel of the bike off the ground, could be enough to get one suspended from school.
Brian Cheng (鄭宇宏), 47, who has been racing downhill for about 15 years, has similar memories of those early days of the precursors of downhill biking. He began riding a BMX bike when he was 12, and had to do so behind his disapproving parents’ backs. One day, while in junior high school, he simply rode his bike to school. Though he didn’t pull any stunts, not even a wheelie, he was treated by teachers as though he were a low-life gangster.
“You must be a troublesome kid to ride a BMX,” he recalls them admonishing him.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS
Today, attitudes toward downhill biking are slowly starting to change. This is thanks in part to a concerted effort on behalf of the downhill community to inform Taiwanese parents, whom Huang describes conservatively as being “protective,” of the relative safety and benefits of the sport for young people.
There is also an ongoing campaign to foster a good relationship with hikers, with whom downhill riders share many of the hillside trails they use. Conflicts between bikers and hikers have turned nasty before, verbally if not physically. But Bagwell Hsu (徐星吉), 34, who rides regularly with the Northern Taiwan Off-Road group, says he knows why some in the hiking community, which far outnumbers downhill riders, are wary of the subculture.
“Putting myself in their shoes, I understand,” says Hsu. “If I were hiking and someone barged down with a bike, I would get frightened. So that’s why we always say, ‘Slow down, this is not a race. If you see a hiker, stop. Don’t just slow down and pass by. Stop, greet them, then go your separate ways.’”
Huang takes things to a greater extreme when it comes to putting the sport’s best foot forward. “In the worst case scenario, I would choose to run into a tree rather than scare a hiker.”
Taimali Township (太麻里) is about 15km south of Jhihben Township (知本) in Taitung County, a glorious ride along the electric blue Pacific coastline. Having spent several days scouting out the upper reaches of the Jhihben River gorge for possible camera trap locations for Formosan clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa), a friend and I decided to explore the next river drainage to the south. The Taimali River gorge is yet another remote and relatively unknown wilderness area of Taitung County that has likely never been properly surveyed for wildlife, and this is certainly the second place that I plan to search for
Taiwan is a crowded country. The average home is small. Farmers tend fields which, by North American standards, are tiny. At the same time, the pace of life is fast. Rushing from A to B, it’s easy to miss some of Taiwan’s smaller attractions. None of the three manmade curiosities described in this article justifies going hours out of your way, but if you’re passing nearby, you won’t regret stopping to take a look at any of them. SHALU’S NOSTALGIC PAINTINGS Shalu’s Nostalgic Paintings (沙鹿懷舊彩繪), also known as Meiren Borough Painted Village (美仁里彩繪村), is a set of colorful artworks depicting Taiwan
In the introduction to his new manual on how to live a meaningful life, Jordan Peterson sets the tone by recounting the hellish sequence of health crises that afflicted his family during 2019 and last year. They included his wife’s diagnosis with a rare and usually lethal form of kidney cancer, and his own downward spiral from severe anxiety and dangerously low blood pressure into benzodiazepine dependency and an acute withdrawal response, near total insomnia, pneumonia in both lungs, and “overwhelming thoughts of self-destruction,” culminating in his waking from a medically induced coma in a Russian intensive care unit with
March 8 to March 14 Forty-five years after her husband was executed in front of the Chiayi Railway Station, 93-year-old Chang Chieh (張捷) was still terrified to discuss what happened. She wasn’t the only one; for decades few dared to speak of the 228 Incident of 1947, an anti-government uprising that was violently suppressed. As wife of the famous painter Chen Cheng-po (陳澄波), Chang is one of the better known widows of the 228 Incident, and not just because of her husband’s name. She calmly retrieved Chen’s body, had someone snap a photo of the corpse and secretly
RSS