Hello,

Maydena Bike Park’s Red Bull Hardline Tasmania kicked off 2025 international downhill racing with a bang.

Thousands of fans lined the course to cheer riders down the hill. From gnarly tech to dust-filled turns to enormous jumps, the course threw everything at the racers.

Get well soon to everyone who crashed out, thank you to all the riders for inspiring us all week, and cheers to the organisers for putting on an amazing show.

Sven Martin was there capturing all the action – hope you enjoy looking through a selection of his photos below.

Cheers,

James
+the Misspent Summers team

PRODUCT: DH NOTES POCKETBOOK

HARD TIMES: Notes from Red Bull Hardline Tasmania 2025 at Maydena Bike Park

• Race winners: Men: 1 Jackson Goldstone 3:17.096 / 2 Asa Vermette +0.233 / 3 Troy Brosnan +2.383. Women: 1 Gracey Hemstreet 4:06.465
• Full results on our website
• Listen to Sven Martin’s interviews with Goldstone and Hemstreet on our Instagram
• Watch the full event replay to see what World Cup-level racing on a Rampage-grade course looks like. This year’s mix of eager young gun racers and long-established legends pushed the pace to a new level. It’s equally scary and captivating to watch
• Everyone’s a winner: the week culminated in the race but let’s face it, Hardline is about much more than competition. A group of the world’s best riders work their way down the mountain over several days, helping each other tick off massive drops, jumps and technical sections until they’ve linked together a whole run. They put out a whole lot of media so we can watch a sport evolving before our eyes. Thank you to all the riders for keeping us fans entertained all week
• Post-race shakedown: Rob Warner and Eliot Jackson interviewed Goldstone and Hemstreet straight after their race runs for Red Bull’s Just Ride podcast, including discussing the mentoring roles of legends Steve Peat and Greg Minnaar, who work for their respective teams
• Short and long of it: Goldstone’s winning time was 22 seconds longer than the shortest 2024 downhill World Cup winning time (Rónán Dunne, Bielsko-Biała, Poland, 2:55.77) and 47 seconds shorter than 2024’s longest winning time (Loic Bruni, Fort William, Scotland, 4:04.26). What’s the ideal run length for TV viewing? Answers on a postcard
• Crash, bang, wallop: the unforgiving course took out some big names during the week, including Rónán Dunne and Erice van Leuven on race day. Dunne smashed into a highly stationary rock while moving at great pace but got away relatively lightly. But van Leuven went OTB on the biggest jump and wasn’t so lucky, breaking her neck, back and wrist – thankfully she’s walking and already ‘fired up to come back next year’. Get well soon everyone who crashed out this week and, again, thank you for inspiring us while risking it all
• Clue’s in the name: this was the second year of Hardline Tasmania. As mentioned in our pre-notes newsletter, the first-ever Hardline Wales was in 2014 on the steep, often muddy and, well, hard course built there by the Atherton family. Dan Atherton helped guide and build the Hardline Tasmania course at Maydena Bike Park and it has developed its own character: higher top speeds (up to 80km/h through the speed gun – faster than the 65km/h at Hardline Wales), milder gradient (both tracks have about 600m vertical drop, across 2.8km in Tasmania and 2.3km in Wales) and, well, Tassie has dust and snakes instead of mud and slate
• Rain overnight between seeding and finals didn’t much affect the track – it remained a dustbowl for racing
• 34 riders (men and women) started the week; 21 completed a race run on Saturday. (And there was roughly a 10% chance of a free lift to hospital)
• There were 21 different bike brands ridden at Hardline: the most represented brands were Commencal and Santa Cruz, both with five riders on their bikes
• There were 10 Red Bull athletes, four Monster Energy athletes and one rider dressed as a can of beer
• Super talented local rider Dan Booker was on a flyer but punctured in the last section and left the track – that’s why he was listed as DSQ (disqualified) in the results. He was named as rider of the week by the organisers
• Line of the week: ‘more Weatherspoon than silver spoon’ (Warner, obvs)
• No punch line: there were plenty of smiles on the hot seat despite a few choice lines about line choice after several Australians and a Canadian opened a fast new inside in their race runs. Sharing’s caring or racing’s racing?
• Alternative reality: Châtel in France hosted the second Snowbike World Championships on the same day as Hardline, with Vincent Tupin and Lisa Baumann crowned as the new Super-G champions of the world. Reuters reported the event – the first time gravity MTB racing has made it onto the global news agency’s platforms since… Snowbike World Champs 2024
• Congratulations to Hardline winners Goldstone (back at the top after a year off through injury) and Hemstreet. Both riders come from the same area of British Columbia and grew up riding arguably the best terrain in the world (Tasmania might have something to say about that – what a place to be a mountain biker)

Further reading:
Amaury Pierron and Myriam Nicole films
Recent bike news you might not have heard

Notes newsletters are compiled with the help of many contributors. Thank you to everyone who chips in – we love doing this stuff and you make it possible.