There isn’t a younger generation coming in really.

Yeah, and Tahnee Seagrave… but they’re not that like, the ‘young’.

I do think about the fact that one minute they’re just younger girls riding and then they’re suddenly really capable and they’re racing and they’re really fast. It’s nice to think that maybe in the same way as I grew up and was a younger racer looking up to Tracy and Sabrina and then had a real good few years racing them, I’d like to think that it’s the same.

Probably Fort William to be honest, that was just insane and I still can’t believe what happened, you never really think about it. Obviously all three of us are striving for the same – we want to be the best in the sport – and then when Dan, Gee and I all won the world Cup in Andorra in ’08 that was so mental because the thought had never really crossed our minds until that day and then suddenly it was like ‘this is amazing!’ It was kind of the same in Fort William: never in a million years did I think that Gee and I would both win it, then suddenly I’d won and he was winning, coming down the track, and… I couldn’t handle it. It was so gnarly. And then I couldn’t believe that Dan wasn’t there. It was all because of him and he wasn’t there.

Yeah, you can’t beat that. Obviously the overall World Cup was pretty stressful, and personally that means a lot to win that, but the actual excitement of that one day at Fort William was just mental.

I definitely know what you mean, because I’ve thought it in this last winter and this off season and stuff, you know, especially with the video and stuff, obviously with the Atherton Project and the stuff before that, the Four By Three stuff. Our focus used to be pretty huge within the industry and I think we did it for so long, and so full on, that I think for a while, for a good few years, it was kind of flooded. The mountain bike industry was flooded with us.

Well as a team, as Brownie and Gill (Atherton PR) have worked super hard with our marketing and pushing that side, pushing us into the mainstream, pushing the sport into the mainstream, now we’ve got some really good contacts, and for us in the last couple of years that has been really important for one reason and another. When you go to a big TV company and they have no idea what downhill mountain biking is, and then they watch it they are absolutely blown away by it, they love it and it’s amazing. With BT Sport particularly this winter, that’s a sort of new channel and stuff, they are really behind it and they love it. It only takes a couple of people who work there to really appreciate it and really get into the sport and suddenly you end up realising what a legitimate sport it is and then suddenly it’s there and other people see it and then maybe before you know it it’s been considered by the IOC for the Olympics or something. If I just race mountain bikes and I do a lot of stuff in the mountain bike media – I’m an awesome shredder and all the photos I do in the MTB mags are sick and stuff – but when I stop racing the MTB industry will have appreciated me, but unless people are already into mountain biking they’re not going to know. I want to try and make MTB as a whole so there’s more people, so the whole industry and the whole sport grows. Because at the moment it really makes me sad that there’s no junior, young British females… you can’t even understand what that makes me feel like. It’s like my whole career’s been pointless. If when I finish racing there’s no one coming through it makes my career and the women’s side of things feel not very legit, because there’s probably loads of people out there who could be really good but they just don’t do it. The broader the competition, the more legitimate my winning a race feels. For me it’s really important to try and get the whole sport more coverage.