When Italian freerider and YouTuber Torquato Testa released his latest video titled, The Hottest Girl at Red Bull Rampage (translated from Italian), you have to wonder, what the hell was this guy thinking?
Featuring images of the female riders in bikinis alongside their Rampage runs, fellow presenter Daniel Valperta rated the women based on looks rather than performance. And while we all questioned the official Rampage judges’ decisions, this style of mysogonestic judgement is obvoiusly unacceptable.
As the MTB social media world explodes with reaction, one commenter nailed it perfectly: “It’s like watching a ‘how-to-lose-all-your-sponsors’ masterclass.”
Testa’s future
Torquato, who was sponsored by Industry Nine (as if they didn’t have enough to deal with) was dropped today after seven years together. NS Bikes released a statement condemning Testa’s actions but didn’t go so far as to drop him. Yet.
Testa himself took the video offline, but the 35,000 viewers that did see it are making a lot of noise and have obviously ruined the YouTuber’s reputation. Testa took to Instagram to “apologize” for his actions, but his apology is so half-assed, it adds more insult to injury than anything else.
Response
Professional mountain biker Micayla Gatto responded online saying, “Some people are like, well you could do it to the men. But we don’t, and we didn’t… Yeah, there’s some really hot dudes on that side of things but none of us are gonna make a YouTube video and rank them on their looks and somehow put those two things together as if their runs and how hot they are correlate in any which way. What the men look like has just never been a topic. So it just shouldn’t be a topic for the women either. Can you imagine? Pulling up all these bathing suit photos of the dudes?”
Here are Canadian MTB we obviously condemn Testa’s actions. We absolutely loved seeing the women compete at Rampage and look forward to much more in the future.
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Canadian Cycling Magazine…