Triple Champion, Zero Tricks | Ryan Gilchrist on his break out 2024 season

What are you doing here, Gilly?” Paul Van Der Ploeg recalls asking Ryan Gilchrist as he rolled up to the 2024 Crankworx Cairns Speed and Style.

Sitting second in the Crankworx overall standings after Rotorua, he was in the midst of an intense Euro racing block with Cairns jammed into a break in his e-EDR schedule. Initially, he’d planned to skip Crankworx Cairns and stay on for what he termed a ‘Polish Pain Camp’ after the Bielsko.

The trouble was, that would put him over the days available on his visa before the end of the e-EDR season. So he pitched a strike mission to Queensland to Yeti Team Manager Damion Smith to chase a few points in the Crankworx overall standings and get him out of Europe.

Flying out of Poland at 4 am the morning after a podium in Bielsko, he landed in Cairns and walked straight off the plane into dual slalom practice — an event he would go on to win — with downhill and pump track still on the agenda later in the week.

Multi-time Queen of Crankworx Caroline Buchanan pulled him aside and asked if he was serious about the King of Crankworx title and planned to do the Speed and Style. Not having many tricks at his disposal, he wavered.

“Then she said, ‘Can you afford not to,’” recalls Gilchrist. “So I got myself a last-minute entry.”

Gilly had never intentionally taken any limbs off the bike in the air until that day. He had the two-hour practice session to learn enough tricks for a Speed and Style run. It was pure survival.

Two hours and a few pucker-worth landings later, he’d figured out how to do a tuck-no-hander and a t-bog to x-up.

“I got myself a top ten (on the day), and after everything was said and done in Cairns, I was leading the King of Crankworx overall by the points I’d generated in the Speed and Style,” he says.

A few months later, Gilchrist would be standing on top of that storied Crankworx overall podium 193 points ahead of his main rival, fellow Aussie Jackson Frew.

Of course, this journey to be crowned at the top of the Crankworx monarchy was only a side quest for the youngster from Coffs Harbour, NSW. His day job is racing the e-EDR World Cups for Yeti, which spoiler alert, he would also go on to win the overall series championships and take fourth place in the UCI World Championships.

From pedal bikes to the e-EDR overall champ

In 2022, Gilchrist spent more or less his entire life savings to chase a full U21 Enduro World Series season. Riding for GT, SRAM and FE Sports, his approach was that of no compromises. By his measure, the gypsy van life method would jeopardise the performances he’d needed to get a factory team’s attention.

“A huge sum of money went into that season. I’d spend over twenty grand before I even left the country for flights and accommodation. I was taking it pretty seriously and doing it all the right way,” he says.

Travelling with fellow young gun Luke Meier-Smith, the pair left their mark on the field. Gilchrist only had two finishes outside the top ten and found his way into fifth overall, while Meier-Smith took the series victory. With such a strong showing, he started doing the rounds towards the end of the season, trying to find a ride for the following year.

It was do or die, and he spoke to just about every team manager in search of an opening.

The one pit he didn’t wander into with a copy of his resume was Yeti. He assumed with its program and the cast of riders already dressed in turquoise, that team was out of reach.

So when he got a message from Jared Graves asking him to stop by the pit for a chat, he was over the moon. His mind started racing. He had been noticed by Yeti. The what-ifs began.

I was unsure about whether I would do it. I was unsure about whether I join Yeti

And then, when he sat down with Graves and Team Manager Damion Smith, they started to say the word e-Bike.

“I gotta say, I wasn’t anti-e-Bike, but I definitely wasn’t as supportive of e-Bike as I am now,” says Gilchrist.

“I was looking for a pedal bike oriented direction, and Jared knew that was my plan. It was a long-term plan, and e-Biking was the beginning of it,” says Gilchrist.

At that point in time, e-Enduro was definitely a B-event in what was still called the Enduro World Series. The races were shunted off to the side. The events weren’t at the same venues, and the tracks and coverage simply didn’t make it look all that great. The stigma surrounding e-bikes was heavy on Gilchrist’s mind.

He also weighed 80kg, and the common wisdom was that e-bikes were a lightweight rider’s game.

“I was unsure about whether I would do it. I was unsure about whether I join Yeti — the dream team — or privateer again, which is crazy talk knowing what I know now,” he says.

You’re not built to be an e-Bike racer

When Gilchrist announced that he’d be joining Team Turquoise and piloting a Yeti 160 E, he was overwhelmed with messages saying he was too heavy to be competitive and needed to get off the Shimano motor if he wanted to have a chance at winning anything.

“All of these messages were well-meaning, of course. These were coming from people who had my best interest at heart and that had been around long enough to know what they were talking about,” says Gilchrist.

He unintentionally poured fuel on this fire, finishing P6 in the Maydena EDR and besting his teammate Richie Rude by one position. He crashed in the Derby EDR but still managed P16 and was just outside the top ten in the overall at the end of the Tassie leg. From here, he’d abandon ship to race e-Bikes for the remainder of the season.

“I got a lot of people saying, ‘How is Yeti doing this to you,’” he laughs. “I was fully committed to racing e-Bikes, and I basically just said, ‘That’s my job.’”

He admits to being a little confused as to why Yeti had recruited him in the first place. He’d never ridden an e-MTB and wondered aloud what he could bring to the table that his teammate Mick Hannah couldn’t.

Little did Gilchrist know that he was a cog in a larger vision. Shimano and Yeti were already looking three years down the line and had said in no uncertain terms that 2024 would be the year they’d win it all. In the 2021 and 2022 seasons, Alex Rudeau had won an EWS-E on a Shimano motor — riding a Commencal Meta Power — but Yeti and all the other teams running the Shimano system were struggling, especially on the power stages.

But in the background, the Japanese outfit had been working hard on the motor and things like the Di2 Link Glide system to give Gilchrist and Hannah the tools they needed to win.

“Them planning three years in advance and calling out that this is the year (2024) we’re going to win is kind of crazy to me. It’s like how do you guys know that? And now I’m looking back at it like, how did you guys know that,” he says.

“The amount of development Mick had done on the motor by the time I got there was huge. We didn’t just win the overall by riding it. We engineered the Shimano motor to a point where it could win,” he continues.

A whole new world

On its face, e-enduro is the same idea as analogue enduro. Ride the timed descents as fast as possible, ensure you finish the liaisons quickly enough to make your start time and be self-sufficient on course.

But instead of 4-5 stages, e-EDR events are 8-10 stages and the liaisons are a completely different beast. Once you start introducing batteries, things get a bit more complicated.

Gilchrist says that at the start he battled some demons with arm pump because there was twice as much descending on a heavy bike and there were some e-Bike-specific skills he needed to pick up. He was sick for most of the 2023 season, still trying to learn the race craft of this new format he was now competing in. Thankfully, Gilchrist had the wisdom and experience of Mick Hannah to lean on, but he was still hovering at the wrong end of the top ten or just beyond it.

I let the leader’s jersey lift me. I rode with the confidence of a series leader.

Coming into the 2024 season, Gilchrist was fit, heat-adapted from racing and training in Australia through the summer, and he had a season under his belt.

The first event in Finale was brutal. But the course was pedally, pumpy and packed full of corners — more or less perfectly suited to the Yeti rider.

“I saw the boys looking at it (the live timing), and I peaked over their shoulder and saw an Australian flag at the top. Immediately, I was like, Mick is doing so good! And then I looked and saw it was me,” he says.

This was going into the queen stage, which had come after a gruelling liaison.

He’d win that stage by ten seconds, and by the end of the day, he’d put 23 seconds into the rider in second place on the GC, Canyon CLLCTV’s Jose Borges. He’d leave Italy wearing the leader’s jersey and ride the Bielsko, Poland World Cup with the number one plate on his bike. He’d take third at the brand-new venue and hang onto the overall lead.

“I let the leader’s jersey lift me. I rode with the confidence of a series leader, which I was so proud of myself for being able to do. I could so easily have just blown it,” he says.

It is SPEED and style after all | The King of Crankworx has no tricks

Back in 2022, when he was still bumming it as privateer Gilchrist was on Vancouver Island ahead of the North American EWS block. A friend from home had sent him a message asking if he knew about the Pump Track World Championships Qualifier that was on the Island that week.

“If you win a Pump Track Worlds Qualifier, you get an all-expenses paid trip to World Champs and the top four qualify — it was in Chile that year. I’m staying on Vancouver Island right now, so of course I’m going to hit it,” says Gilchrist.

Being a privateer, all he had was his enduro bike, which was not going to work. But he had a plan. The weather was doing its Pacific Northwest thing, and the heavens had opened up.

“I showed up with no bike, and I also didn’t have a rain jacket, so I was wearing a garbage bag. I went up to this friendly looking Canadian and said, ‘hey can I borrow your bike for the race,’” recalls Gilchrist.

His new friend Kyle kindly obliged, and they swapped their numbers back and forth during each run. Despite having a brake on the wrong side, Gilchrist managed to book himself an expenses-paid trip to Chile that day — he’d come second to Neils Bensink, who’d already booked his ticket, so the spoils trickled down a place.

A few weeks later, after the Whistler EWS, he raced the Crankworx Dual Slalom — his first one ever — where he knocked out Tomas Slavik and Jackson Goldstone before being beaten by Jackson Frew.

In Santiago, Chile, he’d come tenth at the Red Bull Pump Track World Championships — this time aboard his own bike. In qualifying, he laid down a blazing time, the second fast of the heats, but his rival from Vancouver Island — Benzik — would claim the rainbow bands that year. In 2023, he would come fifth at Pump Track Worlds in Otztal, Austria. Both times at worlds, he was the highest-ranked mountain bike in a sea of BMXs.

“Those first events were more a proof of concept than anything else. I knew I was good at BMX, but working out that I was one of the fastest pump track riders in the world was a crazy realisation. One I probably wouldn’t have come across had I not stumbled into racing Worlds in Chile,” laughs Gilchrist.

Crankworx was never really a part of Gilchrist’s race program with Yeti, and his focus is e-Bikes but he also needed to find some days off the European continent. When the pitch for Cairns was made, Yeti Team Manager Smith said if they were going to make the investment, he’d like to see Gilly win the King of Crankworx overall.

But as far as side quests go, we’re talking about an enduro racer who also happens to be one of the fastest pump track riders in the world, competing in downhill and specialised events that reward being good at pumping, cornering and maintaining speed.

But then there are the tricks. Gilchrist skipped the Speed and Style in Rotorua, but after his chat with Buchanan, he understood it was a necessary evil not to lose ground to his competitors racing the full gambit of Crankworx events.

“My tricks suck. I do the bare minimum tricks and try to make it up with speed — it is speed and style, after all,” he laughs.

By his admission, Gilcrhist’s weakest event at Crankworx was Speed and Style, but even then, he seems to have cracked the code and gotten results, even if his method is a little unorthodox.

“In Innsbruck, I came second to a guy doing a backflip-tailwhip-to-barspin, and I did a double x-up next to it. But I beat him by two seconds,” says Gilchrist.

It was a season-long journey to see if this focus on speed would work. He came into the final event of the season in Whistler, leading the overall but not by much. But Whistler Crankworx is unique in that it’s almost two stops in one, with three downhills, AirDH, Dual Slalom, Pump Track and Speed and Style.

He won the Air DH and Pump Track and took second in the Garbanzo DH for a solid points haul that would provide a healthy margin over Frew in second place in the King of Crankworx Standings.

The very special Yeti Project

When Gilchrist signed with Yeti, he once again faced the same problem he did on Vancouver Island because Yeti didn’t make a dirt jumper. However, in the back corner of the Yeti HQ in Golden, Colorado, where they keep the engineers, a special project was bubbling away. They just needed an athlete to come along with the right skill set to make it a turquoise reality.

“It’s based on Jared’s old four-cross bike, which was incredibly custom and incredibly successful. It’s been about modernising the geometry and suiting that as much as possible to racing,” says Gilchrist.

Beyond the fact that it’s carbon fibre and says Gilchrist’s name on the downtube, this is not your standard dirt jumper. I pedalled it across a car park to shoot photos, and it’s as steep and twitchy as a road bike. Every molecule of this machine is about going fast.

“I’ve been using it on the dirt pump tracks at Crankworx, and I think a lot of the success I’ve had is because this bike is just head and shoulders faster than what a lot of other people are racing,” he says.

That’s all well and good for Crankworx, where he won all the Pump Track Challenges bar Innsbruck — he still came second. But Gilly is fighting a different battle on the tar tracks used for UCI events. Those races are about going as fast as humanly possible around a Velosolutions Pump Track, and there are certain characteristics of a BMX that make them particularly speedy in this arena.

So the challenge for Gilchrist is creating a setup that allows him to BMX-a-fy this bike for racing on a tar track.

“I’m taking all of the things I can control —rigidity, stiffness, rear wheel clearance, lower centre of gravity — by changing tyre sizes, chainstay length and wheel sizes and the like,” he says.

And in his words, “It rips.”

Gilchrist is headed to the Velosolutions UCI Pump Track World Championships in KwaMashu Durban, South Africa, on November 9.

*UPDATE: Since this story was published, Gilly has gone on to claim his first Pump Track World Champs, with fellow Aussi Aaron Donald taking second place.

I was scared. I was almost at the point of writing myself off as a wet weather rider

Mud bogged, and a season goes off a cliff

Riding high from a widely successful strike mission to Cairns, where he’d also find himself at the top of the standings, it all went off a cliff on a wet afternoon in Leogang — literally, he fell off an actual cliff.

On the muddy first stage, blazing into a rock garden, his wheel pinged the wrong way, sending him over a sheer drop in what could be the only spot in Leogang where taking an off-course adventure would cost more than a handful of seconds.

Gilchrist would spend two and a half minutes trying to free solo his 160 E back onto the course. Unfortunately, that set the tone for the day. He wasn’t riding well. He lost the leader’s jersey and had to put the number two plate on his bike. It went to his head.

“I was scared. I was almost at the point of writing myself off as a wet weather rider, and I got pretty negative about it,” he says.

The Haute-Savoie stop in Combloux was another wet race. Before the start, Gilchrist worried he was a flash in the pan. Was he cut out for this? Could he get another contract not being able to ride in the wet? Was he any good at mountain biking?

But with both the EDR and e-EDR running together, it allowed for riders to do the practice day and then ride both races, essentially allowing for another practice. This is allowed by the UCI rules and was a point of contention throughout the season as it goes against the one-practice one-run ethos of Enduro.

But as the saying goes, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Gilchrist managed 31st in the EDR, and given the conditions and his headspace at the time, this was quite an impressive result for the 22-year-old. It served a much needed reset and confidence boost — albeit a short lived one.

The next day, at the top of the liaison going into the third stage of the e-Bike race, Gilchrist was sitting about 15th. He was still battling some muddy gremlins, and he’d started spiralling back towards that dark void he’d just climbed out of.

“I got a message from my good mate Luke Meier-Smith. The message was in two parts, and it came up on my watch, so I only got to read the first part, which said, ‘Hey Gilly, best of luck, man. Remember, focus on the present and not (the) past or future.

I read that, and it fired me up. I was ready to go,” says Gilchrist.

“It wasn’t until after the race I realised the second part of the message said, ‘P.s. don’t drink water from creek or anything. I’ve been f***ed. S****ing like crazy,’” he laughs.

Fortunately, he still had a full bottle, and the words from a close friend were enough to straighten his head out. He would claw his way back on the remaining stages and ride into third on the day.

“That race in Combloux was the most emotional race of my life. I was back in the leader’s jersey which was huge to do that in those conditions,” he says.

There were some liaisons where I’d done them in practice, and I was like, oh boy, I have no choice but to be on threshold and push as hard as I can to make it on time. I wasn’t going to tell anybody that.

Enduros won on the liasons

One of the major differences between EDR and e-EDRs is that organisers make the liaisons intentionally difficult. Not just from a technicality standpoint, Gilchrist tells us that he’s often forced to push past the 25kph limiter to make his start time.

As if Yeti and Shimano pointing for the fences and calling out the year it was going to win the overall through planning and engineering wasn’t already a clue, the mentality in the team is to go into each race prepared, leaving no stone unturned. Something that Gilchrist started doing as part of his routine in 2024 was to ride every liaison on the practice days regardless of how much it would fatigue him.

By doing this and using some of the tools built into the Shimano EP801 drive unit and his Garmin head unit, he could work out exactly how many watts he would need to push to get to the start on time — comfortably and in an emergency situation — and more importantly how much battery power it would cost him.

“There were some liaisons where I’d done them in practice, and I was like, oh boy, I have no choice but to be on threshold and push as hard as I can to make it on time. I wasn’t going to tell anybody that — I’d let them figure it out during the race when they’ve already used their battery up,” he says.

Gilchrist actually won the Finale and Aletsch e-EDR because he was prepared for the liaisons and didn’t have to burn too many matches.

At the series final in Loudenvielle, they’d done the maths and worked out the overall was down to a two-horse race — Gilchrist and Borge. He was wearing the leader’s jumper, and it was his to lose.

“I felt the pressure. I knew that winning that (the e-EDR overall) would mean winning two championships in one year. It would mean winning the first e-Bike overall for Yeti, and also basically fulfilling the Shimano prophecy. Everybody on the team had worked so hard and invested so much,” he says.

Loudenvielle is one of those notoriously French venues where the locals are extremely difficulty to beat. Riding the entire course on the practice day, Gilchrist also realised that the liaisons were so tight that the course wasn’t finishable without incurring a penalty for missing your start time. He told a commissaire, but his concerns were brushed off.

“That day became less about winning and more about marking Jose, and staying with Jose. I just needed to be within a few places of him to win the overall, and it turned out I was actually riding really well. It was muddy, probably the gnarliest mud I’d ever ridden,” he says.

By the time he’d reached the Technical Assistance Zone (TAZ), there was enough time between the leaders himself and Borge that he just had to bring it home in one piece, and the title was his.

“Everybody in the team that had worked so hard, and invested so much in me was there in the finish area. It was super special,” he says.

The icing on the turquoise cake was this came the day after Richie Rude won his overall, Slawek Lukasik was runner up, Yeti Fox Development Rider JT Fisher had come second in the U21 overall, and they’d all but secured the team overall as well.

The UCI presses pause on e-EDR | Is there a future in turquoise?

Unfortunately, the turquoise toppings on the multi-tiered cake Gilchrist and his Yeti Teammates had baked in 2024 came with a bitter aftertaste. A document first obtained by Singletracks Magazine in September, and later confirmed by the UCI in October outlined sweeping changes to the 2025 World Cup structure.

This included the announcement that the governing body would be pressing pause on e-EDR indefinitely, though it would retain its World Champs status and remain an open racing category.

Gilchrist says there had been some whispers going around the pits, and some of the top dogs had no idea this bombshell was about to drop. Or that their jobs were at risk in the coming year. He was given as much information as he needed to know, told to finish out the season, and the rest would be sorted out in due time.

“I was told that information as I pulled out to do a four-hour zone 2 road ride. So I had four hours by myself to think about it,” he says.

“After a two-year journey of basically just realising that e-Bike racing is getting sicker by the year, the level is getting higher and higher. It just doesn’t make sense. The vibe of the e-Bike guys is like ‘what the heck?’ We’ve put in all this work. Why is it coming to an end when it’s just starting to get good,” he says.

For Gilchrist, he tells is he’s grown into the eBike role with Yeti and Shimano. He will be working on Shimano projects and doing e-Bike races here and there, but he’s still pretty nifty on a regular bike, too.

An unorthodox path to the top

Gilchrist’s career has been defined by the following opportunities — even if they are a little unorthodox — and not being afraid to struggle. He’s a highly skilled and versatile rider, no doubt. Some of that comes down to natural ability, but there is something to his willingness to commit and throw everything he has at a challenge to find a way to win.

Making the leap to e-Bikes, even when voices he respected were telling him he wasn’t built for it, has allowed him to prove he’s one of the fastest high-performance gravity athletes in the world. Thrusting himself into an event that weighs tricks against speed, not actually knowing any tricks beforehand, allowed him to be coronated into rarefied air that few riders have ever breathed.

It may be easier for him to win a Pump Track World Championship on a BMX, but he’s committed to achieving those rainbow stripes on a dirt jumper he’s played a role in designing.

Nothing about racing at the tippy top of the elite ranks of mountain biking is easy, and yet, for Gilchrist, there is an analytic and calculated side to his personality that has allowed him to occupy this space, overcome these challenges and win championships in multiple riding niches. But, he seems to find himself in these situations because there is just enough ‘screw it, let’s go’ that he keeps finding himself with new challenges on his hands.

Never stop struggling, Gilly.

Photos: Flow MTB, Graeme Murray / Red Bull Content Pool, Wayne Reiche / Red Bull Content Pool, Warner Bros Discover, Dave Trumpore/ Yeti, Clint Trahan / Crankworx, Kristina Vackova