Mike Ferrentino is a

mountain bike A mountain bike (MTB) or mountain bicycle is a bicycle designed for off-road cycling. Mountain bikes share some similarities with other bicycles, but incorporate features designed to enhance durability and performance in rough terrain, which ...

(MTB)

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...

Beginnings and career

He was born in

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

and raised in

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

. In 1994, Ferrentino began writing a

column A column or pillar in architecture and structural engineering is a structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. In other words, a column is a compression member. ...

for a new glossy mountain bike

magazine A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combinatio ...

that the publishers of Surfer were putting together called BIKE. This column was called The Grimy Handshake, a reference to the column's bike-mechanic point of view and he came to be known as BIKE's "random juggernaut". In 2005, with the departure of editor Ron Ige, Mike Ferrentino became the Editor in Chief of BIKE magazine. He also was guest editor for an issue of the UK MTB magazine

Singletrack Singletrack (or single track) describes a type of mountain biking trail that is approximately the width of the bike. It contrasts with double-track or fire road which is wide enough for four-wheeled off-road vehicles. It is often smooth and flow ...

in 2005. In November 2006 Ferrentino stepped down from the editor role at Bike magazine, and took on a marketing role at Santa Cruz Bicycles, which ended in 2012. He continues writing his Grimy Handshake column for Bike magazine. Mike is currently writing regular columns for NSMB.com, a mountain bike e-zine based in North Vancouver BC that focuses its content on riding on the North Shore (BC) and throughout the Sea to Sky (S2S) region of British Columbia. Mike Ferrentino is a mountain bike (MTB) journalist. He is known for his first-person, you-are-there style of documenting the sport, as well as admiration for writers like Hunter Thompson and Ken Kesey. In his columns, Mike has supported the return of "old school" mountain biking. Specifically, he defines "old school" MTB as light, relatively fragile, cross-country mountain bikes, made with steel- the original, repairable, and resilient MTB frame material. He says that this heavier material means that a person must put in the effort to climb hills before enjoying the reward of riding back down and he criticizes MTB riders who take a ski lift to the top of the mountain along with a bike too heavy to be ridden to the top, then quickly enjoying the downhill before being effortlessly whisked to the top once again.

References

External links

Bike magazine webpage.Singletrack magazine webpage. (UK)North Shore Mountain Biking magazine webpage. (Canada)A place to find some of Mike's writing.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ferrentino, Mike American emigrants to New Zealand Mountain biking journalists Living people Year of birth missing (living people) New Zealand sportswriters