Who is Transparent Racing?

Today I want to talk about who we at Transparent Racing are. This is not a post about who each team member is, as we will be doing that later in the year, this is about our ideals, our program, and why we got started in the first place.

Sometime in February of 2009 Macky Franklin and I were talking on Skype chat while he was living in Argentina. After awhile we both were voicing our frustration at the state of sponsorship and money in the professional mountain biking industry. Particularly the fact that it is very hard to get good sponsorship as a professional racer. But our griping was not primarily that there is little money in the sport but that the sport is not accessible to the public in the way that road cycling is as well as many other high profile professional sports. We believe that this is the reason for limited funds for the mountain bike and cyclocross racing industries, though more on the mountain bike side of things at this point in time.

So the solution presented itself to us at roughly the same time, why not start our own team and try and fix what we believe are the problems. Thus, Transparent Racing was born.

Initially our goal was to not come out until either the 2010 mountain bike racing season or the 2009 cyclocross racing season. Well upon Macky's return to the United States he discovered that the team he has been part of for the past 2 season, Team DEVO, the very pipeline that Adam Craig, JHK, and many other American notables have come through would not be in operation for the 2009 season. After some discussion we decided to shotgun the program and come out by Sea Otter.

It has been a lot of hard work and time but things are slowly coming together. We have already lined up a number of great sponsors: WTB, Rooly Eyewear, Hammer Nutrition, Action Wipes, Squirt lube and Genuine Innovations. We are currently still searching for more as well.

So now that you know our history what are our ideals and how are we going to accomplish this? Our #1 ideal is to be transparent, open and honest with the public in all possible ways. We will be doing this by the main new media sources: internet (blogging, twitter, website updates, facebook, etc.) Not only this but we are preparing to have an independent drug testing service to monitor our blood levels and show the world that our accomplishments on the race track are clean.

Another large aspect of our program is to be an active member of the mountain bike racing community and not just the professional racing community. You will be able to see our training information, gps data, heart rate numbers, etc. after we have finished the technical aspects of the website. We want people to know what we are thinking before races or while we are out training. This is primarily an impetus of a response that Macky received on a blog post at Two Wheel Tales as to what the every day cyclist is looking for. We want to give that to them!

Please keep following us and supporting us as we move forward in this endeavor and try and raise the bar for professional mountainbike racing teams so that once again mountain bike racing can be where road racing is!