The Mountain Bike Journalist Who Just Won’t Quit

Earlier this year in the beginning of March, news broke that Hi-Torque Publications shut down two out of three of its bike magazine titles, Road Bike Action and Electric Bike Action, leaving just Mountain Bike Action along with three OHV-enthusiast titles. Caught up in the slash were three journalists, including long-time editor Zapata Espinoza who lifted Mountain Bike Action to its heights in the days of vast magazine stands.

The call took two minutes, maybe, winding down Espinoza’s career of 30-something years. He’d see a check in the mail.

A month-and-a-half later, you wouldn’t have known. Espinoza, known as “Zap” was in Monterey, California at the bike industry’s biggest trade show of the year, the Sea Otter Classic, buzzing between booths, catching up with old colleagues, and searching for stories with his notepad and camera at his side.

“I’m 63 and my grandpa is one of my best role models,” said Espinoza. “He worked until he was 88 and lamented the time he had to retire. That’s my idea.”

From a spark to a Zap

Espinoza grew up racing BMX and motorcycles as a kid in the 60s and 70s before he went to college in Santa Cruz. He quickly wound his way into writing while he studied politics and wrote homework assignments. Between classes and spending time at the dirt bike track, he wrote and published a punk rock “fan zine.”

But most of his time was spent on the dirt bike track. One day in 1986, he sat in another racer’s lawn chair track side when the rider returned and tapped Espinoza on the shoulder.

“Hey, we just started this mountain bike magazine. We want you to come work for us,” he remembers Jody Weisel, the editor of Motocross Action told him.

Weisel had Espinoza’s attention. Not because he was interested in mountain biking, but because it got him closer to Motocross Action, his true passion.

The offer, modest as the pay may have been, was more than enough to convince him. It was a chance to watch mountain bike racing on the sidelines with his camera and notebook, interview athletes, and write bike reviews. He didn’t need to be a journalism major or even know a lot about mountain biking; he just had to be passionate about two-wheeled sports on dirt. It’s not something he could quantify on a resume, but it was recognizable.

“I’d seen early mountain bikes in Santa Cruz back in the day but I didn’t really care one bit about them at all because it was a chance to work for Motocross Action. That was bigger than a golden ticket for Willy Wonka, it was huge.”

When Espinoza started, he earned $1,000 a month, equivalent to roughly $2,800 a month now, close to what a journalist fresh out of college might make at a small newspaper somewhere across the country today. He had to buy his own camera and equipment.

“It was a shit wage really, but it didn’t matter to me,” said Espinoza. “Everybody that worked there at any of the magazines, we were all just passionate people that got sucked into this job and we were all madly in love with the sport you happened to cover. “

Mountain Bike Action had published one edition when he started. His love for motocross overlapped into mountain bikes shortly after covering enough races and meeting the pioneers.

“I love the sound of motorcycles and sound and smell of them and everything, but to go to Mammoth and have all these people and passion and effort in a mountain bike race and you’re in these trees and there’s no noise, just the birds and the blue sky above. I mean, holy moly,” he said.

After fix or six years, Espinoza had gone from rookie to a voicey mountain bike journalist, competent in his prose, confident in his opinions and unafraid to express them. His voice attracted readers, and with them bike brands who also wanted to get their products in front of readers, in the form of an independent review or a paid advertisement.

Mountain biking was growing but media still had the same channels of reach it had benefitted from for the previous hundred years. If mountain bike enthusiasts wanted to consume mountain bike content regularly before the 2000s, they bought a magazine.

The Mountain Bike Action editorial staff churned out issues on a monthly basis, covered athletes and races and tested–and broke–many of the latest bikes, sometimes at the expense of relationships with brands.

Mountain bike legend Ned Overend recalls Espinoza’s attitude as distinct, daring and opinionated when it came to evaluating products for the magazine. Overend was sponsored by and worked with Specialized, and he remembers his team’s reaction when they saw a raw review.

“Magazine editors a lot of time won’t be critical about products, because we’re also the advertisers,” said Overend. “Zap would push the limits on that and I have a lot of respect for him because he would do that. We didn’t always agree on that, because I worked for Specialized and worked in product development in our XC products and if he didn’t like something, he would say something negative about a product.”

On to a new page

Espinoza’s reputation grew. Editors from Mountain Bike magazine, owned by Rodale, the publishers of Bicycling at the time, had reached out to him earlier in his MBA tenure, but he turned down opportunities. After several years though, he’d fatigued of the typical product and race talk and wanted to write deeper pieces. Instead of writing about the latest product, he wanted to write about the engineer who designed it, and culture commentary, rather than another race re-cap.

Though he described Mountain Bike magazine, which debuted in 1985, as an “embarrassingly lame” publication run by road bikers, it seemed like there was potential and it gave him an opportunity to re-shape a magazine through his own vision. So he took the editor position offered to him by journalist Dan Koeppel, and brought loyal readers and advertisers along with him in 1993. Over his course of ten years, Mountain Bike grew from a circulation of 40,000 and surpassed Mountain Bike Action’s circulation of over 110,000.

Espinoza’s influence stayed true at Mountain Bike and his status in the bike industry seemed to be at a pinnacle. His and Koeppel’s version of Mountain Bike attracted a bright-eyed mountain biker and mechanic who was studying journalism in Gunnison, Colorado and needed an internship to graduate.

Matt Phillips offered to work for free in exchange for course credit and he headed to Pennsylvania where the magazine was based. Phillips remembers meeting Espinoza in person for the first time.

“He’s almost exactly what you’d expect if you read his columns regularly and read what he wrote. And back then all you could do was read,” said Phillips. “There weren’t podcasts, there wasn’t YouTube, so all you knew about somebody was what you read from what they’d written.”

In the office, it wasn’t uncommon for Espinoza to stay until three in the morning and work off of little sleep. As a manager, he could be hard to work for. He had names and numbers through the industry and wasn’t shy about cursing at product and brand managers if his opinions differed from theirs; about sponsored athletes, team jerseys, or factory race trucks.

“I knew he had influence, but when you were there and saw the people coming through and who he knew, and the people he could dial directly…it was amazing,” said Phillips. “He had this sway and power in the industry that I don’t know anyone has had since and probably never will again.”

In 2003, things were changing, within Mountain Bike and outside. A “squeaky, skinny white guy from New Hampshire or something,” showed up and started terminating editors across the publisher’s titles, Espinoza said.

As an in-your-face West Coaster, he didn’t get along with the East Coast intellectual who wanted to make the content more accessible and “dumb it down.” Mountain Bike had grown into an enthusiast title and catered to the core mountain biker and reader. Friction between the two never smoothed. They terminated Espinoza and eventually rolled Mountain Bike into Bicycling during the manager’s restructuring of Rodale.

A new frontier

Espinoza went to work for Trek as a brand manager after he left Mountain Bike and took the family to Wisconsin, but it wasn’t long before he was vying to return to California and work at Hi-Torque again. Weisel offered him a position running Road Bike Action in 2007 and he could still get his hands dirty at Mountain Bike Action and Motocross Action.

By this time, the media landscape was changing rapidly. Mountain bike news websites (like Singletracks) sprouted across the horizon and suddenly print magazines faced a hazy fork in the road: Embrace the digital rush or stay true to print media.

As editor of Road Bike Action, Espinoza could see the change in front of him. When he went to Europe to cover the Tour de France, it was often just him and another writer pushing stories to print that might not come out for weeks. Other magazines had small teams and were publishing almost immediately.

This posed the biggest dilemma at a time when digital publishing emerged alongside print. Do readers want to see something on a screen in a few hours, or read about it in print in the next monthly issue?

“What digital brought more than anything that changed so much of how journalism worked was the timeliness,” said Espinoza. Like a lot of print magazines with paying subscribers, Espinoza focused on the print product first and then web content. In hindsight, this was probably a mistake, he said.

Advertisements changed too as the years went on. Espinoza later launched Electric Bike Action in 2013 and was the editorial director for all three cycling titles. Bike brands had always had a clear method of advertising in print publications which supported staff jobs, but now they had an ocean of digital opportunity. He worked harder and harder to fill dwindling amounts of ad pages and worked doubly hard writing for both print and web, while he still bought his own equipment, lived on a flat salary, and ran off of passion.

“Unless you were completely insane and really passionate about what you were covering, like me, like Jody, and a handful of others, it was hard to stay on. But still the greatest job in the world,” said Espinoza.

What it meant to be a mountain bike or cycling journalist changed with the digital frontier. Now there were podcasters, video journalists and YouTubers and “personality editors” as Phillips, who still works for Bicycling puts it.

“The way I’ve described it is, media, especially in the last 20-30 years–tumultuous. The bike industry: tumultuous. Put them together and it’s just at max all the time. It’s taken me a really long time to get used to it. Everything seems to be in constant flux and chaos.”

Before Road Bike Action closed its covers, Espinoza remembers talks about how the publication might use Chat GPT or artificial intelligence as a tool. It was another burr in his saddle as the cycling media landscape added sponsored content and posted more brand-written press releases without clearly noting them or filtering hyperbole. It all delegitimized the authenticity of the publications, he thought. Espinoza fought to keep the magazines he worked for as authentic and genuine as possible until the day he was laid off.

“Legitimacy is a key to authenticity and vice versa and that’s always been my deal.”

Some things never change

When I called Espinoza in October he’d finished talking to cyclist Victor Sheldon for a story. He was audibly excited about the interview and said he would write it that evening. Sheldon asked him who he was writing the article for.

“Me! I still love doing it,” he said. “I still wake up everyday knowing I’m gonna talk to somebody about bicycles or motorcycles everyday of my life and it’s the greatest thing I can do, but greater still is I can tell a story from it.”

Since leaving Hi-Torque, he’s started his own website and social media channels where he publishes his own content. He’s been writing columns about culture, motorcycles, and bicycles old and new, and he writes copy and editorial as a freelancer, though he calls himself a consultant instead. His girlfriend and others have been telling him he does too much for free.

Espinoza would likely respond he’s struck by passion and the innate desire to tell stories about bikes and the people who ride them. It’s the sort of attitude that is both infectious and humbling, even to other bike journalists like myself. Phillips at Bicycling, who now has roughly two decades of bike journalism under his belt, admits the he probably doesn’t like bikes as much as Espinoza.

“It’s by sheer luck that I was able to knock out four decades of this and it was all I ever wanted to do,” he said.

Espinoza calls himself “Mexican conduit,” explaining the impact he had on readers across the globe. “To be in Switzerland I was that piece of conduit that could tell a story and shoot the photos that someone in Buenos Aires or Hawaii could know about it or pretend they were there.”

Through everything that has changed since the mid-1980s when Espinoza began writing, the magazines that have come to print and gone or morphed from printed words into into words backlit by LED, what hasn’t changed is his passion to tell authentic stories about bikes and bicycle riders because they are good stories–not because a public relations or marketing rep needed a favor or because it made a brand look good, or it would bring in potential ad dollars.

His love and expression for independent media and traditional journalism is still recognizable, whether it’s griping about the latest technology that’s made his life harder and complicated the industry, or by queuing up a story with a reference to “All the President’s Men,” the iconic journalism movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman about the Washington Post journalists who brought down President Nixon. Bike media may be more convoluted–and challenging–than ever, but there is a lot to appreciate about Espinoza’s ethos and perspective, what it’s given media thus far and how he may inspire the future.