MEET THE SINGLETRACK

Hannah crosses the paper/internet boundary to unearth some of the truth behind a few of the Singletrack Forum personas we know as ‘The Big Hitters’.

WORDS HANNAH 

PHOTOGRAPHY VARIOUS

If you’ve hung around our Forum for any length of time you may well have come across the term ‘Big Hitters’. It’s one that’s often uttered with fondness and respect, but equally comes with connotations of too much time spent on the internet. A few Forum threads have sought to identify and define a ‘Big Hitter’ and, while we have referenced this source material in the research for this article, as the overlords dwelling in Singletrack Towers, we’ve taken a few executive decisions in deciding who to include – or exclude – here.

What we hope you find in the pages that follow is the sense of community that brings Singletrack readers together. It’s (probably) the mountain biking that brings you here, but it’s the patter that keeps you coming back. Many of the Big Hitters have been here since the beginning, or before The Great Hack, (when, one Christmas, a teenage hacker took down the entire site and we lost all that history). But it’s not just time served that makes you a Big Hitter – there’s how much you say, what you say, and whether you start a conversation or just argue on others’ threads. There are a few worthy of a mention who aren’t in the pages that follow. There’s no Binners. We decided that we wanted to bring you the people behind the usernames, who don’t already exist in our mind’s eye through other means. So, despite his services to pies and crayons, Binners is too otherwise-famous to be included here. Scotroutes is similarly a bit too well known – he’s one of those rare breed who has a regularly updated blog.

McMoonter is practically a Forum meme – as MoreCashThanDash (another contender) once said: “Every time my therapist helps me get my life back on track,

McMoonter pops up with another amazing lifestyle thread.” Perchypanther is another who could easily have been included for his endless (and unnervingly quick) comedy responses.

It’s not all bikes, fun and log piles though, and the Forum is a place that sees many through tough times. TiRed has brought science and reason to the Covid thread. Gnusmas has brought his heart of gold to many a Forumite in need, and the Forum has rallied to his aid too. There are more – like Bullheart, Simon F Barnes, and Soulrider – whose lives on and off the Forum brought inspiration and joy to many before their fingers tapped those keyboards one last time. So many lives enriched through relationships forged in a virtual world, and occasionally cemented in the real one.

What we’ve got for you here is a curated selection of Big Hitters. They’re mostly old-timers, from the days before The Great Hack, though not exclusively. Some are universally sweet and lovely and helpful, others have our wonderfully patient team of Moderators biting their nails. Some we approached didn’t want to risk losing the anonymity that the Forum affords. And before anyone stages a ‘flounce’* (have we had a really good one of them recently?), non-inclusion doesn’t mean you’re not a Big Hitter. It’s just that the pages of a magazine are limited. Luckily for you, the internet is bottomless. There will always be room for you there, and here, in our Singletrack society. Let us meet some of its citizens.