Since its inception, Red Bull Rampage has become the premier event in freeride mountain biking – participation in it is the ultimate goal for anyone in the sport. Over the nearly quarter-century since Wade Simmons slid and dropped his way to victory in 2001’s first edition, Rampage exists as a kind of record of the progression of big-mountain freeride: bigger jumps, deeper drops, and ever more style. But that growth, until now, had one major omission. This year, on October 10, that will be corrected as eight top women freeriders will compete in Rampage for the first time.
As you might imagine, the road to this milestone has not been linear or smooth. After all, women have fought for entry into substantially every part of every sport where they now have a presence. And proving their place has never come easy. But maybe this particular effort was necessary in order for women riders to find their community, and build something unmatched.
Because of the nature of the event, Red Bull Rampage has always been an invitation-only competition. It’s held near Zion National Park in Virgin, Utah, home to a sandy, intimidating, cartoonish landscape where fluvial erosion created monstrous cliffs and canyons 200 million years ago. The only trails on these steep drop-offs are those built by the freeride athletes, and even those are more a series of launch points and landing zones than anything truly trail-like. The format is similar to big-mountain freestyle skiing or snowboarding, with athletes judged on difficulty of line, technical ability, and combination of tricks performed.
First-time entrants are invited to compete at Rampage only after submitting a video to prove their skills, and keep their start spot by placing among the top riders. There have never been explicit rules against women competing, but over the course of 20+ years, none have been invited.
There have been quite a few ups and downs in the history of Rampage. Rule changes, location changes, massive injuries, and an evolution to how it works today. But along the way, despite endless efforts, women have always been excluded when it comes to riding. Until now.
While this will be the year we finally get to watch women freeriders have their day in Virgin, the moment has been years in the making, and has only come to pass with determined, sustained work from women inside and outside the sport. And while it’s a goal achieved, it is, for them and those who will follow, only a beginning.
Katie Holden’s Dream
Katie Holden, 39, started her freeride journey back in 2002. And for a long time she felt like she had a path and the support that she needed. But that got complicated once she got a taste for Rampage.
“In the early 2000s there were a bunch of women who were really interested in freeride and doing all these cool things,” Holden told Escape. “There was an event during Crankworx that gathered tons of women and I was able to connect with all these people I looked up to.”
Holden attended Rampage for the first time in 2010, and helped out as a digger. A huge part of Rampage, and what makes it so unique, is the process of digging the riders’ lines. Diggers are athletes, team members, and sponsors who literally build the line that the rider will compete on. Each rider works with their two or three-person dig team to construct chutes, jumps, canyon gaps, and landings. Crews use hand tools such as shovels, picks, and rakes. They also have access to sandbags and water. The dig is arduous work in the early-autumn desert heat, and not for the faint of heart; it often involves dangling from sheer cliffs by a rope and harness.
There are no existing trails at the Rampage venue except what competitors like Casey Brown, shown here, build themselves – often on slopes so steep they must be roped in and wearing climbing harnesses.
For Holden, and for other women who also worked on dig crews for male riders, it was both a clarifying moment and a statement of intent. “It was the most mind blowing experience of my life,” she says. “At that point it was still a little more of the wild west feel. But I knew I had to be a part of this. It flipped a switch for me.”
Compared to other disciplines, Holden has always been most interested in the big bikes. “I’ve always been into the aggressive downhill and technical terrain,” she says. “And Rampage takes all the pieces of the puzzle that I love and puts them together in one location. You have to be really good at technical riding, and jumps, and drops, and riding with fluidity.”
By 2012 Holden had transitioned to racing and freeride, but there was no real pathway for women to get into Rampage. Looking back, she admits she rather naively assumed it would just happen. But as she realized after several years of working toward that goal, it was going to take a lot of strategic work.
In 2013, she signed on as the first ambassador for Liv. “They were the first brand that ever believed in my Rampage dream,” she says. “Until that point I had never had a brand 100 percent believe in me.”
Liv gave Holden a budget to create a video – the project she thought would finally be her Rampage ticket. But what felt like an insignificant crash tore a muscle in her calf and halted filming. “I put so much pressure on myself and it came literally crashing down in a matter of minutes,” she recalls.
“It felt like as soon as we started filming it was over. The dream just ended in a second. I had a couple injuries after that, and so it felt like the sport passed me by, like I fell off the train.”
Holden needed some time to recover from the disappointment of not seeing her Rampage dream come to fruition. But then, she realized the dream was bigger.
“Rampage is an event, but there needed to be so many other changes, well beyond the event, to actually create change. It was time to create a pathway for women.” Enter Rebecca Rusch.
‘Why are there no women here?’
Rusch, 56, has been a Red Bull athlete for 22 years, is a seven-time World Champion in various endurance sports and an Emmy Award winner, among too many accolades to possibly list. She was not and has never been a freerider. But she’s a mountain biker, she has been competing in a male-dominated world for a long time, and she knows how to ask the right questions in order to spark action.
“I definitely was not an expert in freeride, but in 2017 as a Red Bull athlete, I got the opportunity to go to Rampage,” Rusch recalls. “And I’d never seen a competition like it before. I got to be part of it, and see all the energy, and basically asked the question that everyone was thinking: ‘Why are there no women here?’”
If there was one person who everyone could agree on as the most obvious woman to gain entry into Rampage first, it was certainly Casey Brown. She had breakout performances on every freeride stage she was given, and started her own freeride event, the Dark Horse Invitational. Brown, 33, raced the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup, the Enduro World Series, and was a regular on the Crankworx World Tour. She has seemed destined, maybe more than any person ever, to compete at Rampage. After years of knocking on the door, she’ll finally get the chance.
“It takes a lot of convincing,” Brown told Escape. “I think there’s a lot more hoops in any industry. It’s always a little bit harder for women to get through, because we have to get a ‘Yes’ from a dude. So it takes more time, and we’ve got to prove ourselves a lot more.”
It wasn’t for lack of talent that women hadn’t been able to break into the Rampage scene. And because Rusch had been a Red Bull athlete for such a long time, she felt comfortable putting it out there in a blunt way. “I knew a ton of people and have pushed my way through male-dominated sports my whole life,” she says. “I felt comfortable going to the source and asking the question. Not in an aggressive way, but in a ‘This is weird, right?’ kind of way.”
Rusch had done something similar back in 2010 when she launched the SRAM Gold Rusch Tour, a series of mountain biking events for women, because she noticed that there weren’t any women at the races she was competing in. She was fairly new to the mountain bike scene then, and found herself intimidated. So she started asking questions.
Rusch invited Holden, prominent gravity racers Leigh Donovan and Jill Kintner, and other notable women in the sport to be part of the Gold Rusch Tour, and was blown away by the talent. That was the team she went back to when the Rampage question came up.
Rusch created a roundtable meeting at Red Bull in 2018 to ask all the questions. Not just why aren’t there women at Rampage, but also: how do we get them there? “We sat down with some Red Bull executives, people from the Rampage organization, and also some male Rampage athletes, like Darren Berrecloth, and my goal was to be the instigator,” she says. Rusch kept pushing. If she was met with an answer, she’d respond with another question. If women don’t know the process of digging, how can we teach them? There were, she says, some tremendous advocates who heard the call and listened.
The dig crew is where several women, including Holden, really fell in love with this event and knew they wanted to be part of it in every way. Women have been on dig crews for many years, and there is a lot more than just grunt work. They’re confidants, guides, contemporaries who can help envision and manifest a line that is both bold and aggressive and achievable – a definition that varies by the rider. Athletes depend on their team to help them learn how to ride the line in the best and safest way possible. The diggers are the heart, brains, and belief system of the whole event.
And dig crews are also a place where aspiring riders gain valuable experience to help power their own progression in the sport, which is partly why women wanted to be part of them. Rusch saw that women had done the time on dig crews, and it was time for them to also be the stars of the show. “I appreciated getting the view from the male freeriders,” Rusch said. “They talked about how they progressed in freeride, and that Rampage didn’t just always exist. They talked about how they had to do their own grassroots events, and hustle for it.” In short, they told the women they needed to do their own work, not in a threatening way, but so that they’d have a strong community and a base they had built for themselves.
And at the end of the meeting, a plan was hatching. This eventually led to Red Bull Formation: A high-level, invitation-only, non-competitive freeride camp for women, aimed at advancing their skills quickly. Similar to Rampage, women would learn to dig their own lines. They would also practice jumps and grow the community.
A movement builds in Formation
Rusch had helped set the groundwork for Formation, and Holden took the reins to really make it come to life. “When Formation came about I felt like I had been operating out of a scarcity mindset,” Holden says. “I felt like there were limited seats at the table, and I wanted to protect my space. And then Rebecca Rusch came into my life, and she became this huge mentor for me, and gave me so many opportunities. She taught me what it was to be part of a community. Her motto was always, ‘lift as you rise.’
“She taught me that if everyone is working together, there are more opportunities and more pay and more everything for everyone. When she came into my life and taught me all of that, it was a really strong thread and we went from that point forward.”
The first Formation in 2019 gathered many of the top freeride women, at a venue Rampage had used previously. “We set the Formation expectations from the beginning,” Holden said. “It was not about you, it was about us. We were working together. Everyone in that group was selected because they brought something different to the table. And, yeah, we were all fully capable on the bike.”
Holden says Rampage had built a reputation. “I don’t want to call it hyper-masculine, but it’s a macho environment. And people are really protective of that image. So breaking into it and showing that not just one woman but a group of women could ride it, that was the first crack.”
Hannah Bergemann, 28, is a freeride and slopestyle mountain biker who has found immense success in the sport. She was selected to ride at Rampage this year but an injury in September meant an alternative was selected to take her spot.
Bergemann really started taking freeride seriously when she was invited by Holden to the initial Formation in 2019. “When Katie invited me, she called me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this event I’m planning in October. I can’t really give you that many details, but we’re going to be riding in Utah. It’s going to be awesome, so leave your calendar open for these dates,’” she recalls. “And I was so pumped to have that opportunity to go to Utah and ride with other girls.”
Bergemann didn’t really even know what she was getting herself into, but she knew it was going to be in Virgin, where Rampage was. “I was so excited. And it was definitely a changing point in my career.”
Just like at Rampage, Formation had riders bring their own dig teams, and they invited media so that athletes could feel a little bit of the pressure of being in front of an audience – skills they’d need to compete at the real deal. “Each rider rode the line on their own, and they got media on them,” Bergemann says. “So it felt like a mini, low-pressure Rampage, but it was more fun. We were riding together, building together, and it wasn’t competitive at all. We were having fun.”
After Formation 2019, the event skipped 2020 due to COVID-19, then returned in 2021 and 2022. But the event was postponed in 2023, and then canceled with no real explanation: Another bump in the road.
Vaea Verbeeck, 33, who is competing at Rampage this year, said the unexplained cancellation of Formation last year was a bit of a blessing in disguise. “After Formation in 2021, we knew Rampage was in the cards for women, absolutely,” she says. “We were exponentially blowing up. We said, ‘Let’s start to make a plan because we’re going to be there very, very soon.’
“We had another chat with the folks at Red Bull and it seemed promising. But then things went really quiet. We kept following up, and didn’t know if Formation was going to happen.”
Red Bull released a statement that Formation would be pushed from the spring to the fall, which made many suspect women would be in Rampage. But when the Rampage roster was announced for 2023, it was once again all men.
“That’s when the public got really loud,” Verbeeck says. “Which was a little uncomfortable for the riders. There were lots of loud and unfiltered voices and opinions, which were supporting us, but also not helping. There’s a process to things. In the end, it definitely put some pressure on Red Bull, and gave us a chance to be as ready as we could possibly be.”
Finally in the start house
Finally, at the beginning of June this year, Red Bull announced that there would be a separate day for the women at Rampage.
Verbeeck said she’s excited to see what the women will do on the largest stage in the sport – if they’ll hold back a bit or let loose. “I have a slight expectation that no one’s going to go absolutely bonkers, wild card, send it, without being sure that it’s going to be dialed,” she predicts. “Just because everybody wants to make a good impression, not only for themselves but for the event and the sport. Then again, maybe we’ll skip right to going bonkers.”
Camila Nogueira skips straight to bonkers during a run at Red Bull Formation. Photo © Red Bull Content Pool
Regardless of whether the women play it cool and collected or go full-send, everyone has found some relief just in getting to this point. “I’m so stoked to see it happen,” Holden says. “The decision was made [to have a women’s competition at Rampage], then the women submitted videos and eight riders plus four alternates were selected. They’re so ready. You can’t deny it.”
On October 10, Camila Nogueira, Casey Brown, Robin Goomes, Vaea Verbeeck, Vero Sandler, Vinny Armstrong, Georgia Astle, and Chelsea Kimball will make history. (Nogueira broke her nose in a crash on Tuesday but is hoping to ride Thursday’s finals.)
“Along the way, there were many times when I thought, why would I want to be part of this if they’re not going to let [women] in, and I’d get angry about it,” says Holden. “But another part of me was so insanely stubborn. I always kept thinking, this has to happen.”
Thanks to that stubbornness, and to so many women working together, it’s happening.
“The timing for this is pretty perfect,” Brown says. “Because back when I was first trying to get into Rampage, there wasn’t really a full roster of women. So now that there is a full roster, and so many more women than just the eight here now who could do this, it’s a really great time for it to happen. I think it’s way more fun and awesome for all of us to be able to push each other and support each other.”
The women are already in the midst of digging and preparing for their big day in Virgin. It’s sinking in that this is really happening, and the air is full of excitement.
“I wouldn’t call this a battle won, because we’re not fighting against anything or anyone,” Rusch says. “It’s a massive goal achieved. I know it felt like a battle for Katie, but it’s a goal achieved. It’s a mountain climbed. And with any mountain, you get to the top and realize there’s another one over there. So this isn’t the end point. Anyone alive can see what’s happening with women’s sports, women in politics, women in business. There’s no going back. It’s a mountain climbed and there’s a whole mountain range out there for us to keep exploring.”
The first-ever women’s Red Bull Rampage takes place Thursday, October 10. The event will be streamed at 9PM EST/3AM CET/11AM AEST (Friday) on Red Bull TV and Red Bull Bike’s YouTube channel.
Did we do a good job with this story?