Who’s Faster—Riley Amos or Christopher Blevins?
Could these two riders rise even higher in the years ahead?
With Christopher Blevins’ win over Riley Amos at the Orange Seal Pro Cup this past weekend, we wanted to take a look back at how often they have beaten each other when they were racing at the same events.
Amos had beaten Blevins in their last four matchups before this past weekend, so their races should be well worth watching in the months ahead. This is going to be Riley Amos’s first full year in the Elite Men’s ranks after taking the world’s U23 title last year.
Blevins and Amos are two of the best male cross-country racers in U.S. history. Blevins was the first male U.S. rider in many years to win an XC race at a World Cup event.
Riley Amos got the highest finish by a U.S. male ever in the Olympic mountain bike race when he took 7th in the 2024 Olympics last summer; Blevins placed 13th. We checked the website xcdata.com this week to see how the two riders records compare now and saw that the website already has this past weekend’s race included in their comparison of the two riders. Here’s what XCData.com shows for the race history of Riley Amos and Christopher Blevins now.
As we can see, Blevins has beaten Amos in 75% of their races together. However, in 2024, Amos beat Blevins five times, while Blevins beat Amos four times.
While it can be frustrating to have such tough competition when you’re racing, it’s tough competition like this that can drive both racers to train even harder, just so they can beat each other. And that kind of competitive drive is what raises racers to the highest levels of the sport.
The two greatest male cross-country racers in mountain bike history have been Nino Schurter and Julien Absalon. When you add them all up, the two won a total of 31 UCI Elite Men’s XCO titles, with 15 World Championship titles and 16 World Cup Series titles . When they were racing against each other for several of those years, the drive to beat each other was so great that they both went to extraordinary lengths to get better. Absalon was most famous as a climber. Nino was most renowned for his descending skills. At the height of their competitive battles, Absalon worked on improving his descending skills so Nino couldn’t pass him on the downhill sections, and Nino worked on his climbing skills so Julien couldn’t drop him on the uphill sections of the courses.
As a result of their even tougher training that came from trying to beat each other, they became the two top cross-country racers in history.
Absalon won 7 Elite Men’s World Cup titles; Nino has won 9 so far. Absalon won 5 UCI World Championship XCO titles. Nino has now won 10 such World Championship titles. Absalon won two Olympic gold medals; Nino has taken home one gold, one silver and one bronze. And they earned all the above titles from 2003 to 2023,
If Christopher Blevins and Riley Amos keep working harder and harder to beat each other, it’s possible that they could become two of the strongest XC racers in the world over the coming years.
Of course, that’s only a possibility. The top racers in Europe face similar challenges in their own countries, and they’re probably just as driven to win as Riley Amos and Christopher Blevins.
