BetterRide Coaches
Gene Hamilton
Owner and Founder
D.O.B April 20, 1966
Hometown: Montgomery, AL
Resides: Morrison, CO
Favorite Trail: If I told you they would kill me
iPod: Hank III, Split Lip Rayfield
Gene’s love affair with anything and everything two wheeled started when he was six and he got his first purple, banana seat bike for Christmas. It has been quite a journey since and he certainly never thought he would make a living on two wheels. Although he started riding bikes when he was quite young he struggled at most sports and was not what anyone would call a natural athlete. He has been teased about his funny walk since he was a kid and never came close to passing the “Presidential Fitness Test” in school. Growing up fast (6 feet tall in the 7th grade) he wasn’t the most graceful kid and his asthma didn’t help. Despite never even winning a “novice” class race he was at the BMX track racing every Sunday for two years in his teens.
In the spring of 1987, just a few months after learning to ride Gene competed in the Snowboard World Championships where he finished 20th in the amateur half-pipe competition. Following that season he moved back to Virginia to finish college but continued competing on the East coast. After graduating from Old Dominion University in 1989 Gene accepted the position of Director of Snowboarding at Wisp Resort in Maryland. While at Wisp he continued to snowboard professionally and was the coach of the race team. During the next five years Gene chose to move back to Colorado and train with Team Breckenridge and Team Tiehack in Aspen. These were Gene’s first years being coached and it had a profound effect on his future. He learned that coaching is not just about skills but in helping people feel confident and keeping them motivated. In 1993 Gene did his first mountain bike race and was hooked. He raced the following two years as an amateur before during pro (downhill) in 1995.
In the fall of 1996 he accepted the Head Snowboard Coaching position at the Steamboat Winter Sports Club. This was his dream job and really enjoyed seeing the kids that he coached grow and become more confident. Part of his job was to stay on top of the sport and become the best coach he could be, he got paid to take coaching courses! USA Skiing and Snowboarding had an amazing coaching staff and Gene took full advantage of the courses they offered. The next three years were spent coaching snowboarding in the winter and racing mountain bikes in the summer. After nearly 10 years of spending the winter living in ski towns Gene tired of the cold and moved to the warmer climes of Boulder, Colorado in the fall of 1998.
BetterRide was founded that fall and it has been quite an adventure over the last 10 years. Gene has coached over 1,200 riders from beginners to top pro racers, filmed a special for the Discovery Channel, written mental training articles for Dirt Rag, been featured in The New York Times, Decline Magazine, Mountain Bike Action and USA Today. Over the years his passion for coaching has continued to grow and he continues to learn and improve his coaching with every session taught. His mountain bike coaching highlights include coaching many top pro racers, top junior experts and over a 1000 riders who just want to get better. He is a pretty good racer too, in 13 seasons as a pro racer he has won a Silver (2002) and two Bronze Medals (2006, 1999) at the UCI World Masters Championships.
The History of BetterRide (in Gene’s words)
BetterRide was born out of frustration. I spent hours and hours training harder, skipping social events and limiting time with loved ones to make sure I got enough recovery. I changed my diet several times, changed my workout program and read all the info I could but was barely getting faster year after year. It was this frustration that lead me to start looking for people to teach me better riding skills in the late 1990’s. Unfortunately for me there were no skills coaches at the time. Well there were a few cross country pros teaching camps but I saw these racers walking sections that I could ride. They didn’t have good technique, they were just really fit.
As a former snowboard racer and snowboard coach at the time this further frustrated me, not only did I not have the skills I needed to go faster but there was no one to teach me the skills I needed. I knew in snowboarding there were specific skills and techniques that were correct, they had been studied and perfected just like a martial art. Where could I find these techniques for mountain biking? I was sick of just “hanging” on in the corners, hoping I made them and sick of racers who I knew weren’t training as hard as me beating me. Have you felt this way? By the beginning of 1998 I had three years of pro downhill racing under my belt but other than getting a little faster do to improving equipment I was still mid-pack at the big races. I remember “Pistol” Pete flying by me in a corner in practice and later asking him how we did it and he replied with something like, “you know, just attack the course” or something to that effect. Everybody was happy to give advice but the best racers couldn’t explain what they were doing and they were definitely doing something I wasn’t doing.
Since I couldn’t find a qualified skills coach I decided to take matter into my own hands. I already had seven years of experience from coaching snowboarding and really enjoyed helping people improve so mountain bike coaching seemed like a perfect fit for me. Thanks to three years spent as the head coach of the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club and USA Skiing and Snowboarding I had quite an education on how to coach effectively. So I retired from snowboard coaching and put my energy into to learning how to ride mountain bikes correctly and how to teach others to ride with confidence. I read books by top motocross coaches, studied videos of the best mountain bikers in the world and then asked them pointed questions (thank you Nathan Rennie) and worked with racers like Marla Streb and Greg Minnaar to really figure things out. I have spent the last ten years perfecting the techniques I have learned (unfortunately many mountain biking skills are not intuitive, you could ride for years and not learn these skills (I was racing professionally for over ten years before I learned many of the skills I teach)) and improving my ability to teach these skills. In the process I have been fortunate enough to coach some of the best racers in the sport (Chris Van Dine, Lynda Wallenfells, Andrew Pierce, Eli Krahenbuel, Naish Ulmer, Ben Craner, Sarah Kaufman….) as well as some great people who just like riding bikes. With the help of these riders, racers and coaches I have developed a fun and structured way to teach “The Core Skills of Mountain Biking”. I really enjoy helping others and would love to share these techniques and the drills for practicing, getting good at and eventually mastering these techniques with you.
Andy blasting a berm at Sol Vista
Andy Winohradsky
Head Coach
D.O.B Feb 18, 1973
Hometown: Somewhere in South East Michigan
Resides: Denver, CO
iPod: The Eye Balls
Favorite Trail: The one he is riding
Andy has been working for BetterRide for the last four years. In that time Gene has taught Andy the BetterRide way of coaching and Andy has taught Gene a lot about riding bikes!
In Andy’s words: I grew up in Michigan on steady diet of bmx bikes and dirtbike motorcycles. Although there were a few years in there where I did compete quite a bit at the local sanctioned bmx and motocross races – with a decent amount of success - a good chunk of my riding – the best and most valuable part, I’ll say – was spent just being a kid and screwing around on two wheels with my buddies: backyard bmx tracks, suicide ditch jumps, hill-bombing, blasting powerlines and jeep roads, terrorizing abandoned local gravel-pits …
Those were, as they say, “the days”…
In high school it was all about stick-and-ball sports. Then, during the summer before my freshman year of college, while getting in shape in an attempt to minimize the ass-whipping I was about to receive in my first year of college wrestling , I found myself on an early version of the MTB and back out on all old trails and jeep roads, hill-bombs, and gravel-pits. And that shit was fun.
Pretty soon wrestling was more about keeping me in shape for the summer race season and then soon after that there was only racing.
In 1997, as soon as I was finished with school, I turned pro and moved to Colorado to see how far I could take the racing thing and to have a good time doing it. In the next five or so years I consistently put up good results locally including a few race wins here and there and a dual slalom series championship. At the National races I consistently got my ass handed to me and went broke doing it. But I had my moments: in those days gated racing was done in the good ol’ dual slalom format, and most of the time I could make the cut for the big show, Saturday-night-under-the-lights, with ESPN, smoke machines, crazy announcers, and a big-time party, early-MTB-days style. Brian Lopes or Eric Carter or Mike King would usually put me out after the first round, but hey, I was
there …
Around 2002, I slipped out of racing to go do other things that made equally as little sense as trying to make it racing downhill mountain bikes such as being a pro photographer, random spontaneous traveling, and playing music.
But I never stopped riding. Motocross, a ton of dirt jumping, and, of course, lots of XC were constants. In about 2007 I got back on a DH bike and found out I hadn’t lost much speed. The next year I worked full-time at Sol Vista, raced for their team, and proved to myself that, even as an old man, I could still hang in the pro class and still had the courage to get knocked unconscious on huge jumps.
My racing days may be fairly limited from here on out, but I continue to learn and progress as a rider – perhaps, and perhaps surprisingly – more now then at any other time in my life. And I still love riding as much, if not more, then when I was a kid, screwing around in the sticks of Michigan.
And who knows, maybe there still is a podium or two in my future? Look out Old Guy’s Class …
