Decline Magazine is without a doubt one of the most influential and relevant publications in mountain biking today. Scott Hart is co-founder, editor and advocate of all things MTB related. We sat down and asked Scott a few questions about his history in the business and his thoughts on the current state of riding. If you want to know where the sport is going then look no further...

Let's start from the beginning. What got you into riding?
I raced ATVs and motocross for my entire childhood. When I turned 16, I had graduated from mini
bikes and was going to move up to compete in the pro class on the quad the following year. I won four Amateur National Championships in the youth division and had support from a pro team out of Missouri.
But just a few weeks before the season was to begin, the guy who ran the team, Delty Winfrey, got cancer. I turned to my dad and said, “Well, Dad, looks like we need to get a 250 prepped…and fast,” and he just looked back at me and turned his pants’ pockets inside-out. Up until that point in my career, my father had sacrificed everything to get me to where I was in racing – to be in a position to receive a pro ride. Every penny my family had went to racing. My dad ran his own truck repair shop and had compromised even its existence over the last five or six years of chasing points and championships around the country. We practically lived in our family van and trailer, spending holidays in hotels and doing homework on the road. He couldn’t sacrifice any longer. I had two options: Number one was driving a sprint car or midget. Living in the dirt track rich Midwest, we had a lot of resources but not enough of the most important resource required in motorsport racing: Money. That’s when mountain biking came in. Bicycles were sort of my “hobby” around that time. I rode BMX forever and had competed in a few cross-country mountain bike races around age 12. I knew I’d be starting from scratch, but mountain biking seemed fairly inexpensive so I worked at my dad’s shop to earn money, sweeping the floor and doing small jobs like replacing windshield wipers and polishing the Rubber Duck’s hood ornament and stuff. A few months later, I bought Mountain Biking Magazine’s “Mountain Bike of the Year”, a fully rigid KHS Montana Pro, and, with my driver’s license in hand, set out to go racing. Mountain biking has always been my own endeavor and I’m very proud of that.

At what point did you decide to pursue a job in the bike industry?
Throughout high school and college, I always knew I wanted to work in “the” industry. I didn’t know in what capacity or even what industry, whether it be auto, moto or bicycle, but I knew I didn’t want an everyday-Joe-job. My dad worked a lot of long, hard hours in his life and he made sure I knew the importance of doing what I loved.

What industry-related jobs have you had in the past?
I bummed around a bike shop in college, but I wouldn’t call it much of “employment” since my roommate managed the shop and we just goofed off the entire time. After graduation (Ball State University, Bachelor’s Degree – Marketing, 1999), I moved to California and worked for Mr. Dirt counting bolts and washers and placing them in plastic bags with chainguides. I was living on Mr. Dirt’s floor, on an old couch that Eric Carter gave me after it sat in the dirt at one of the Mountain Bike Moto Days out at Glen Helen. After living in SoCal for a few months, I got in to test riding for Mountain Bike Action. Combine that sort of internship, holding John Ker’s light meter between shots, with a few small articles I wrote for a motocross website, braaap.com, and that led me to believe I could make my own magazines.

What role did you play in the development of decline?
I am one of the four founders. Ralf Hauser, myself and Mark Jordan had been working as editors for our then associate publisher, Dave House, at another magazine for about a year when we decided to jump ship. As editors, we were at our wits’ end with all the compromises we were constantly forced to make for our publisher. The job had become not fun. Ralf and I had both reached a point that we were ready to quit.
So one day at work, we walked out to the parking lot to “have a cigarette” with Dave to inform him of our decision. After Dave received the news, he took another drag and said, “Why don’t we go do this on our own?” A week later, we were all unemployed. A month later, we had produced three magazines – all on our own, from scratch. It was one hell of a crash course. I didn’t sleep for the last four days and Ralf didn’t sleep for five days. It was like that for first few years. We produced a new magazine every two weeks with the three
titles: Twentysix, decline and Road. We produced Twentysix, which was our monthly, all-around mountain bike title with cross-country as the backbone of the content, and decline was only created every other month. The funny thing is, when we first started, decline was only a passion project. We thought Twentysix, with it’s broader appeal, would be the breadwinner. But by the end of the first year, we realized that the industry wanted decline. So we gladly benched Twentysix and didn’t look back. Now, Twentysix has morphed in to an annual photo special that is produced under our H3 Publications label.

What is a typical day like for you when you're working on the magazine?
With a small, four-member staff producing a monthly publication, there are many small jobs that pop up
and you have to wear many different hats. You have to be a writer, a photographer, a manager, a nurse, a boss, a student, a slave, a mother and sometimes an ass-kicker to get everything done. I’d say 99-percent of my time is spent coordinating – coordinating the content of the magazine, aligning media partnerships and just being the detail guy on all things “decline.” And then there’s the website…

What effect do you see websites, blogs and videos having on the future of mountain biking?
Genuine influence is often wielded behind the scenes, by people who, though outside the limelight themselves, create the moods and trends that provide background for the overall community. I cut-and-pasted that from a mainstream news site I was just reading. Convenient plagiarism. We’ll run it.

You come from a racing background; does that explain your overwhelming enthusiasm for the Dual
Slalom?
My enthusiasm for dual slalom is derived from logic. “Gated” mountain bike racing is in a decrepit state. Mountaincross, or the European practiced “4X”, isn’t working. Don’t get me wrong, I was the first guy to get behind the mountaincross initiative. I was in attendance at Eric Carter’s first Troy Lee Designs “Cycle Race” that was held between motos during the Glen Helen outdoor motocross national in 1999. I can honestly say that watching that race changed the direction of my life. At the time, I was a semi-pro cross-country racer, just dabbling with downhill, but after seeing EC’s Glen Helen event, I was sold on gravity racing. The bicycle race was awesome! The jumps were huge; the passing was plentiful; and the action was insane. I remember being overwhelmed that Shaun Palmer, Phil Tinstman, EC and the rest of the guys on mountain bikes actually looked like they were going big, even when compared with the full 30-minute motos of 125 and 250 pros I had just watched. The jumps were massive. Over the next few months, I slowly began to defect from XC as DH began to garner my interest. A few years later, when Sea Otter held their first Eric Carter-designed mountaincross event in 2001, I was there. The jumps were big and the racing was fun. The same can be said for the first mountaincross races held by NORBA later that year. As a rider, I was happy to see slalom go. Coming from moto, I was always comfortable jumping and thought mountain biking could benefit from larger jumps, so I was all about the 50-foot doubles that mountaincross promised. But here we stand, seven years later and mountaincross has not blossomed into the beautiful flower we all expected it to bloom into.
The dreams of huge television audiences and big outside-the-bike-industry sponsors don’t exist. Mountaincross is a great event, in theory, but it’s extremely difficult to actualize. Seven years is a long time to try and get a sport on it’s feet and despite the efforts of many competent event promoters, visionaries and course builders, mountaincross still can’t stand on its own.

Dual slalom is better than mountaincross for many reasons. The racing is always fair. No slalom race has ever been won in the first turn. In slalom, riding skill and bike control are rewarded over meatheaded first straight speed. Dual slalom courses are simpler and less expensive for race promoters to execute. In those two ways, slalom supports the grassroots level of the sport. Mountain bikers are attracted to the sport by characteristics that slalom supports – railing turns with rocks and dust. Slalom is like mini-downhill by promoting all the skills necessary to be successful in both disciplines. Mountaincross, as it has been practiced for the past four or five years, has become nothing more than diluted BMX. I was at a local MTX race this weekend and it looked like 1970’s BMX – flat turns and small jumps. My negativity towards MTX doesn’t mean I think MTX is a fruitless genre, but it will never see large participation numbers when promoted at mountain bike events. MTX is better suited as a crossover discipline for BMX. Mountaincross would be more successful if it were promoted by the NBL or ABA. In the last seven years, we’ve learned MTX isn’t a mountain bike sport. A lot of people aren’t going to like hearing me say that, but it’s honestly where I think we’re at: We tried MTX and it’s not working.

Right now, the UCI is taking serious consideration to add dual slalom to the World Cup. They can’t figure out why their participation numbers are so low for “4X” and are trying to find a way to get more of the downhill racers to enter their “gated” event. When was the last time you saw today’s most prolific downhill racer, Sam Hill, enter a MTX event? I can’t recall off the top of my head. But, when was the last time you saw Sam race slalom? Crankworx and Sea Otter last year. Most downhill racers aren’t interested in MTX for the reasons I stated above. Slalom is the answer to grow the sport of competitive mountain bike racing. Dual slalom and downhill go together like peanut butter and jelly – they’re complement goods. MTX is a bastard child we tried to adopt, but it just doesn’t fit the family chemistry of our sport.

In 100 words or less name anything that is wrong with mountain biking right now:
There isn’t much wrong with the sport. The sport of mountain biking in all its forms – chairlift-assisted gravity riding, DH racing, big mountain freeride, all-mountain pedaling, dirt jumping, freestyle – is great. Think of the last time you went riding… Pretty good, huh?

With that said, what is right in the sport and who are the people taking things in a positive direction?
What’s right? The riders. The energy level in all-terrain cycling is at a high level right now and it’s moving in new directions than it has over the last few years. I follow the energy of the community to determine the content of decline, which is funny when people criticize me, personally, for being “too freeride”. I’m no freerider; I have an appreciation for good riding, of all sorts, which is why I have my job. If there was a lot
of freestyle in the magazine in the past, it’s because that was what the community was most energetic about, at that time. By default, a magazine is in an “opinion leader” role, regardless of credibility. And running a magazine is all about being intuitive enough to identify genuine actions, discarding impurities and controlling your personal biases as you communicate the magazine’s content to the world. I know it sounds like I just cut-and-pasted that, but I barfed that up on my own. Simply put, I let the community tell us what to put in the magazine.

If I could look in to a crystal ball, I’d say a lot of community energy is headed towards racing in the next few years, as well as simple go-out-and-ride-your-mountain-bike type of all-mountain riding, too. The mountain bike is an incredibly versatile tool; I can’t think of another two-wheeled machine that can be used in more ways than a 26-inch-wheeled bicycle. You can’t ride a road bike over dirt jumps, but you can on a mountain
bike. And you can ride a BMX bike over dirt jumps, but you can’t ride it through a rock garden – you need a mountain bike for that. You can do anything, and everything, on one mountain bike; it truly should be called an “all-terrain” bicycle. And because of this diversity of the mountain bike machine, you will find kids dirt jumping, riding street, jumping off cliffs and riding through the uncut wilderness on these 26-inch bicycles.

I think the people moving things in the right directioin, right now, are the younger generation. A lot of the current under 21’s have been really impressing me with what they’re accomplishing in the 26-inch community. There are young riders that are coming up with fresh new style and the young kids involved
behind the scenes (like Ryan Denehy and Doug Smith, for example) are approaching the industry with a different perspective. The younger generation gets me excited about where this sport is going to go in the coming years. Mountain biking has tried a lot of new stuff in the past ten years and we’ll continue to try new things, like mountaincross or whatever the kids dream up. If it works, we’ll run with it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll go back to the drawing board. But, regardless, I know it’ll be fun and thanks to the all-terrain bike being so versatile, I know it’ll be possible.

When you're not riding what else do you enjoy doing?
My girlfriend, Andrea, is able to pry me away from my obsessions regularly and forces me to be a real human. She’s always in to something. And our new associate editor, Griz, is a pretty competitive guy, like me, so we’re always doing something for score: Go-karts, bowling, whatever. I’m actually quite blessed that my hobby is my job. I’m not always making magazines. I have a lot of side projects that garner my interests, but are still new challenges that keep my involvement in the sport fun – whether it be helping coordinate new events, judging contests or whatever. Lately, I’ve taken an interest in announcing events, as well as attempting to organize a race team for next season. So I plan on getting in to some new stuff this year…