Do You Know The Top U.S. Mountain Bike Racers Of The Past 40 Years?

Wikiepedia is a quick and handy resource for lots of information. We often check its listings of the UCI Mountain Bike World Champions and World Cup Champions.

However, one place that they’re currently needing help is in their listings of the United States National Mountain Bike Championships. The Wikipedia page has many of them listed, but they’ve also got a lot of blank spaces in their listings, and they’ve also got a number of years with no names listed.

We were looking at the listings this morning and saw that Wikipedia has posted a warning that they might take down the listing unless someone can cite some reference sources for the information,  to show that people didn’t just make up the lists.

Several years ago, MBA’s John Ker was looking at the list of Women’s Cross-country World Champions on Wikipedia, and John saw the name of some woman he couldn’t remember ever having seen before. He thought the list might be wrong, so he called one of the world’s top women racers of that year to ask her about the other woman listed. The woman John talked to remembered who won the title that year, and it wasn’t the woman named on Wikipedia. John verified who the real winner was that year, and corrected the Wikipedia list himself.

Here are the people Wikipedia lists on their site for the U.S. National Mountain Bike Champions:

Here’s the link to that page:

There’s a big gap in the Men’s Cross-country rankings, with no one listed for the years from 1993 to 2001. As we recall, Tinker Juarez won the national title three of those years. We think John Tomac won the title at least one of those years. We’re not sure who won the other years. We could probably find out if we dug through all our back issues, but we wanted to see if anybody else would be willing to fill in those blanks.

We talked to Joe Breeze at the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame and asked him to take a look at the list. Maybe someone with the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame can help fill in the gaps and provide some source material that Wikipedia can cite so that Wikipedia doesn’t take down the lists of the riders.