Can rivals be friends? Can competitors be comrades? Whether on the race track or your home trails, is it right to share your training sessions or will you lose your edge? We sat down with Ines Thoma from the Canyon Factory Enduro Team to talk about friendship, a competitive mindset and the evolution of the Enduro World Series.
Your value as a pro athlete can usually be put down to one thing: success. The better you perform, the higher you are in the rankings, the more you take home at the end of the day. But reaching the top means being better than everyone else. What do you do with that unspoken part of human nature, a byproduct of ambition, that means you might end up wishing ill on others who are already at the top? Is it avoidable? In the Enduro World Series, the answer is yes – especially in the women’s field. While there’s just as much at play to reach the top, there’s a notable absence of rivalry. Instead, the riders might actually choose to ride together in the off-season. Between stages, the riders support each other and at the end of the weekend, they’ll sit together and say cheers for a great race. Is it for real?
Blurring the vision between competitiveness and friendship – how genuine are the words, “Good luck!” when they come from someone racing against you?
Someone who knows the state of affairs better than us is Ines Thoma. The German rider, who races for the Canyon Factory Enduro Team (now part of the new Canyon Collective), must have one of the fullest race slates at the EWS, having missed only one round since 2013 due to a spinal injury.
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