A CAUSE FOR QUESTION
Dave Wiens, the executive director and face of the International Mountain Bicycling Association, pulls into the dirt parking lot in his 2001 Chevy Suburban. It’s a Saturday in late July, at the base of an alpine drainage near Colorado’s Hoosier Pass, five miles south of Breckenridge. Wiens gets out and throws on a white tank top, stuffing a tube and energy gel in his pocket. Then he puts on a T-shirt that reads #mountainbiker. The tail hangs low over his Topeak-Ergon team-issue Lycra. He has scrapes on his right arm and leg from a recent crash.
Before the steep climb to 11,000 feet begins, Wiens, who is 6-foot-2 and has the tan, sun-bleached look of someone who’s spent most of his life outdoors, says hello to a local Forest Service worker out for a morning hike. Upon learning of Wiens’ role at IMBA, the forester raises his eyebrows and says, “Oh,” almost sympathetically.
Wiens comes from ag stock; both his parents grew up on farms, one in Idaho and one in Kansas. They raised him and his older brother in Denver. “Bikes were my freedom,” he says. IMBA has never had a director like him: a Hall of Fame racer turned grassroots advocate, as core as mountain bikers come. “He has the respect of the advocacy demographic and the rider demographic, which is hard to find,” says fellow pioneer Ned Overend, whom Wiens passed to take third at the World Championships at Mammoth Mountain in 1989.
Wiens would later win six straight Leadville Trail 100s, the final one ahead of Lance Armstrong in 2008. He also won two World Cups and refused to shave his legs, hence his nickname, ‘The Vanilla Gorilla.’ But lately he finds himself in the midst of a prickly debate about the future of mountain biking’s biggest advocacy organization, which turns 30 this year and which Wiens has led since February 2017, after serving on the board for a year. Recent public statements about E-bikes and Wilderness, following a run of very public upheaval and financial freefall, left IMBA depleted and on the defensive. Wiens is trying to change that.
He’s had a long week for a 53-year-old. He schmoozed at the Outdoor Retailer show in Denver on
