The Biking Community – Kath Bicknell

Proud to be back with SBS Sport as a cross-platform producer and editor

I’m thrilled to share that I’m back working 1-2 days a week with SBS Sport digital team. I worked with this team from 2013-2018 before a complicated injury to my pelvis and sacrum meant I had to dramatically scale back my work capacity for a few years. During that time, I was beyond glad to continue working in research, slowly lifting my hours as my health became more robust again.

In returning to SBS, I’m not only proud to be working with a team I really admire and look up to, but I also feel a strong sense of pride and contentment for what this signifies about huge health gains over the last five years and the steps it’s taken to achieve them.

The digital team creates and curates content in whatever form we think will best reach different parts of our audience: articles, video, social, in-app, basically anything you consume on some kind of screen.

I arrived just in time to get skilled up before the Tour de France as a digital domestique. In addition to pumping out cross-platform content on the Tour itself, I’ve also enjoyed creating content that shares a bit about the expertise and passion of colleagues who are creating it.

If you’re someone who is interested in learning more about the behind-the-scenes of work in media, you might enjoy these two articles:

The #SBSTDF team share their most anticipated moments of the 2022 Tour de France

The #SBSTDF team on the moments they are most looking fowrad to in the 2022 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift

A lot has changed since I’ve been gone, but there is also a lot that is so welcoming in its familiarity: the rhythm of digital workflow routines, all kinds of stories to share from the sports world, and passionate, creative colleagues who are so motivated, collaborative and generous in their approach to content creation and distribution.

There is a much bigger focus now on video and on sports beyond, but still largely including, cycling and football. I’m thoroughly enjoying learning more about all of it.

To previous colleagues who are doing other things now: gee I miss you. I still draw on the many things I’ve learned from, and admire in, you all in roles outside of media as well. When it comes to article titles, subheaders, social media, and much more, one line that echos through my mind often is from my previous SBS supervisor Phil Gomes: ‘Just say what’s in the can.’

It’s such a joy to be opening up more cans again and sharing the contents that lie inside. I hope you enjoy some of this multi-platform content too.

On learning from experts’ embodied experience, in the situations where they thrive. New book chapter with John Sutton.

We can learn so much from people who are really good at what they do. So how do we do this? And why does it matter?

A book chapter by John Sutton and I asking, and answering, these questions was recently published in an exciting volume pulling a whole range of interesting work on skill together: The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, carefully and cleverly edited by Ellen Fridland and Carlotta Pavese.

For our contribution – ‘Embodied experience in the cognitive ecologies of skilled performance‘ – we take a brief tour through some of the existing research on experts and embodied expertise and explore some of the many, varied (and quite cool) methods for producing this. Contrary to the view that experts can’t accurately recall or articulate what they did and why when the pressure is on, we finish by looking at a case study from road cycling that shows just how much some people can tell us about their own performance processes – why they did what they did, when they did – and why this is so incredibly valuable to researchers interested in skilled performance processes. The chapter is also a plea to more researchers to study expertise in the complex, unpredictable settings where that expertise is deployed: out in the world rather than in a lab or other controlled environment. (Although the lab studies sure do teach us a lot as well. Truth be told, I often want to share this chapter with researchers I look up to in a range of different disciplines and say, ‘Work with us! This is what we bring to some of the questions that you are interested in as well.’ Collaboration and healthy interdisciplinarity for the win!)

Humbled to be named as one of Ride Guide’s Top 50 influential people and events in mountain biking

But most of all, thank you to Ride Guide for considering the writers. No one ever thinks of the writers!

Without words and the perspectives of the writers and journalists, mountain biking may well have been another gear based sport, but there is something more to this than riding and racing. It can be the struggle, the exhilaration, the adventure and mis-adventure, the highs, lows and tragedies. A writer has a gift to transport you to another place and take you on a journey, drawing you in with their with their words, and for a short period, you become transfixed to the page (or screen). The writers below have the ability to do just that, so still do it, while others have moved on. Either way their legacy and future work will continue to shape this sport for years to come.

Continue reading “Humbled to be named as one of Ride Guide’s Top 50 influential people and events in mountain biking”

Published: Technology, Equipment and the Mountain Biker’s Taskscape

What do we mean when we talk about the connection between bike, body and trail? How do small changes in bike set up change the way you move? How about a whole new bike?

My chapter, “Technology, Equipment and the Mountain Biker’s Taskscape,” was recently published in Women in Action Sport Cultures: Identity, Politics and Experience, edited by Holly Thorpe and Rebecca Olive. Drawing on theory from anthropology and phenomenology, this chapter looks at some of the behavioural and social implications of the cycling industry’s shift to design bikes with female riders in mind. It draws on my work as an academic in conjunction with my work as a product tester working for bike media.

Abstract:

Research exploring risk in sport tends to focus on the relationship between behaviour and action from a psychological or subcultural standpoint. In this chapter I explore the variable ways technology mediates experiences between body and world, action and perception. I do this by drawing on insights from phenomenology and anthropology to investigate recent developments in bike design aimed at improving the ride experiences of female mountain bikers. This foregrounds the role technology and equipment can have on the development of confident ‘I cans’, demonstrating the impact equipment has not just on performance, but on behaviour and embodied perceptions of risk. By exploring the way new technology mediates individual and social experiences in mountain biking, this chapter reveals the dynamic relations between equipment, perception, cognition and performance.

The book brings together compelling perspectives from a range of academic disciplines on sports including climbing, parkour, snowboarding, surfing, mixed martial arts, roller derby and biking. It makes me proud to be a rider, and proud to be part of this growing, global research community as well. You can read more about the book, including previews of other chapters, here.

If you can’t track down a copy of the book through a university library, but are interested to learn more, please get in touch.

Photos, including a couple of the local ride crew in Sydney: Kath Bicknell

Video: Equipment advice for mountain biking in Cairns

One of my favourite things about mountain biking is that no two trails are the same. Local environmental conditions dictate the design of quality trails, the experience of riding them, and the mountain biking culture that develops around them. In fact, this is the very reason mountain bikers love to travel so much.Continue reading “Video: Equipment advice for mountain biking in Cairns”