Four-cross racing (also known as 4X) was one of the most exciting mountain bike competitions ever invented, but it mostly disappeared from the U.S. and much of Europe around 10 or 15 years ago.
Four-cross racing hasn’t completely disappeared, though. It’s still practiced in Great Britain, and the UCI still lists 4-cross racers in the UCI mountain bike rankings.
We think that putting on four-cross races was probably too big a challenge for most race venues. The top race locations usually had to have downhill and cross-country courses, but adding four-cross courses took up a lot of extra time, space, man-hours, and expenses.
We suspect that most of the race venues didn’t want to deal with the trouble and expense of adding 4X courses if they didn’t have to. If there weren’t a lot of riders wanting to do it, it would probably be too much trouble and expense to put on the four-cross races.
Nevertheless, there are some riders and countries that still do it.
When we checked the UCI mountain bike rankings today, we found the following rankings of the top 4X Men Elite riders included:
(Note: the ranking date is the European version, so “02/03/2026” means March 2nd rather than February 3rd.)
We noticed that the four top riders in the rankings are all from Great Britain.
What’s more, the top two riders, Duncan Ferris and Scott Beaumont are 43 and 48 years old respectively, which makes us think that some of America’s older four-cross riders could probably still do well, too.
Here are 11 Elite Men listed in the latest UCI 4x rankings:
When we went to see how many other Elite Men four-cross riders there were in the listing, we found that there were only 11 riders in the category.
We then checked the Elite Women’s category and found only seven riders in those listings, including one American, Abigail Hogie.
Here are the current women’s rankings:
We would guess that it would be challenging to bring four-cross racing back to life in the U.S. and the rest of the world, but it would be fun to see it taking place again.
Here’s a video about four-cross racing by the Global Mountain Bike Network, if you want to see what it looks like (it looks like the link won’t work, but we tried it and it did work):
Here are two four-cross photos that Rob Jones shared with us around 15 years ago.
Here’s the link to Rob Jones’s story on the 4X World Championships in Champery, Switzerland in 2011: