Building the Future of Mountain Biking: Shane Coppin

For a very young sport, a lot has changed in mountain biking in its short life span. The range of riding styles, the features of the bikes, and the fact that mountain biking is more of a recreational sport than just a competitive one are all good things. Mountain Bike Australia (MTBA) are the governing body for the sport in Australia. While that is mostly seen as something relevant to riders who compete, it flows down all the way to getting young kids on bikes as part of school sport. I spoke to MTBA CEO Shane Coppin, who started in his position 18 months ago, about where MTBA and the sport is in Australia.

Notably, Coppin isn’t a mountain biker. Or, he wasn’t before starting.

“I came in very raw. I came in without any history of the sport. The first few months were a rush putting the 2013/2014 National Series and Championships together. But then I had to try to work out the structure and the relationships and where we sat with everybody and what everyone else was doing. I had to figure out what we could do to facilitate and grow the sport.”

That is not to say he was inexperienced. From watching both the 2013/14 and 2014/15 National Series’ from the sidelines, I can see the differences that new management has created. Bigger events, better locations, and better promotion. Plus there are many more new programmes sprouting from MTBA. Coppin’s aim is clear, he needs to tie a lot of people together.

“I’ve said this from day one: national sporting bodies are about facilitating opportunities. It’s about trying to provide as many opportunities, channels, services and opportunities that you can for the entire sport. We need to be very careful we don’t get lost in one part of that, be it events, or high performance. How do we make sure someone new to mountain biking will be exposed to the wide options of the sport?”

And there lies one of the biggest challenges – perception. MTBA need to provide elite athletes with the support required to achieve their goals and work toward qualification for World Championships, plus Commonwealth and Olympic Games. But they also need to help clubs and groups get more people on bikes. Their role is across the whole sport. Coppin has his own for his time at MTBA.

“I have a number of personal goals. The key goal is to try to build the sport up to a better place. When I leave hopefully I will have made a positive impact for many people, and hopefully I will have opened up new opportunities for new people in the sport. But I also want to leave new opportunities open for the next person to develop.”

Looking back on the last 18 months, I can see the changes from Coppin’s leadership, and the hard work of others who work for or with MTBA. We have a functioning National Series, with Championship events that are covered on national television.

National Championships Coverage: Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Rider Gallery

We have a Gravity Enduro national series and championships, and the same for marathon racing and cyclocross. But Coppin knows that MTBA isn’t here to be event promoters, they’re here to work with them. So many different people and groups have worked tirelessly to develop the sport around Australia, and Coppin believes MTBA need to recognise that work and help support it.

“We still have some work to do, but the common thread is that most people want to achieve the same thing. They want good events, that are working cooperatively and together, and I think that keeping an open approach to that, and having an open door and talking to people to see where we have those common threads to build a relationship that we can build a partnership from helps. That’s what we have done, we have tried to identify a number of good events and not say we can’t utilise an event just because it’s run by a promoter or a club. We have to recognise the efforts that have been put in.”

Coppin realises that some events must be run by the governing body though, to provide the services the sport needs at the elite end, and grow what they can offer.

“A lot of the push to not run events is to mitigate costs but particularly in the transition we’re in, there’s a need and responsibility of the national body to insure a certain level of events meets the right standard and level. It’s very hard to expect someone else to foot that bill. For the time being our focus is on delivering the National Series, and National Championships. But the marathon series, enduro series and cyclocross series all work under different models so we can engage in what already exists out there, and just umbrella over the top to make a series.”

“We want to invest and develop some category one events next year. These things are all very important for the development of the sport and its interntaionl representation. Those sorts of things come at a cost, and with certain demands, and they’re best managed for the time being under our organisation. We’ll revisit it after two or three years. This year was a big step forward, we got our events back to a well contained cost.”

If you have seen our current issue, you might agree that our national level racing has been better this past season than in a long time. This is just part one, we talk to Shane Coppin about junior development and the schools programme in a coming feature.