Mike Ferrentino
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mike Ferrentino is a mountain bike journalist. He is known for his first-person, you-are-there style of documenting the sport, as well as his avowed love for writers like Hunter Thompson and Ken Kesey.
He was born in California but raised in New Zealand.
Ferrentino came to the attention of most mountain bikers when he began writing a column in 1994 for a new glossy mountain bike magazine that the publishers of Surfer Magazine were putting together called BIKE. This column was called The Grimy Handshake, a reference to the column's bike-mechanic point of view. Ferrentino was the bike shop everyman, representing the oft-maligned, but equally oft-worshipped bike mechanics.
While others came and went during the period between then and now, Ferrentino - BIKE's "random juggernaut" as he was called - stuck with the magazine. 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 well-regarded UK MTB magazine Singletrack in this year.
Mike is known for being a champion of "old school" mountain biking. This means many things to many people, but in Ferrentino's case it can be taken to mean a love of light, relatively fragile, cross-country mountain bikes, made with steel- the original, repairable, and resilient MTB frame material, and it means that a person should put in the effort to climb hills before enjoying the reward of riding back down. This is as opposed to the increasingly popular practice of riding 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.
As of 2006, Mr. Ferrentino has not been inducted into the prestigious Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, however, a grassroots movement by members of the Bike Magazine Message Boards is currently underway.
