Aaron Gwin: His name is program

If you take the "G" out of his name, you are left with "win", this seems to be a kind of vocation, because winning is something Aaron has been successfully proving for years. For years he has been one of the best mountain bike downhill racers in the world. He has just changed bike brands and the season has started strong.

by Rolf Fleckenstein

If you take the "G" out of his last name, you can see that winning is already in his name, and that's how he lines up. Last season, the American downhill racer carried home the most World Cup wins and would certainly have finished as number 1 in the UCI world rankings had he not pulled such a boner at the World Championships with his crash and finished the 2015 World Championships in 74th place with 5 points. With 300 points, the newly crowned world champion Loïc Bruni (see our previous issue 1/2016) was able to pass Gwin on the UCI world ranking list and thus also claimed the world number 1 spot in 2015 with a 103-point gap over Aaron Gwin.

Podium finish guaranteed
He has been racing in the UCI World Cup since 2009 and has steadily improved his ranking, but he has been good for podium finishes for 8 years now, but the podium finishes have increased significantly in the recent past, only at the World Championships he has not yet managed to make it onto the podium, a 4th place has been the best the 28-year-old American has been able to achieve so far.
His downhill roots go back to his early BMX years and his time as a motocross rider. Aaron Gwin started riding BMX at the age of four. At the age of 8, he switched to Moto-X and soon started racing. But at 17, he had enough of the constant injuries that nagged him and hung up his career.

His friend Cody Warren encouraged him and advised him to take part in a downhill mountain bike race just for fun. He even lent Aaron his downhill bike. And the advice was worth its weight in gold; fun turned into seriousness. How much talent he had, should still prove in the following years, but from this point on the career as a downhill professional was born.

Its origins
He started with BMX, but another passion shapes his life: Motocross: Aaron Gwin is an excellent motocross rider and he has excellent conditions in California to practice and train this sport. These riding skills are of course more than beneficial to him in downhill, after all ...