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.
He was born in California and raised in New Zealand.
In 1994, Ferrentino began writing a column 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 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 in 2005. In November 2006 Ferrentino stepped down from the editor role at Bike magazine. He has is the marketing and art director at Santa Cruz Bicycles, and continues writing both feature articles and his Grimy Handshake column for Bike magazine, he also writes a regular column for Singletrack magazine in the UK.
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.
Although Mike is a celebrity in the mountain biking industry, and has been repeatedly nominated to the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, he continues to refuse to accept the nomination. He prefers instead to avoid the spotlight, living quietly and as invisibly as possible in Santa Cruz riding the local trails as much as he possibly can.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Ferrentino http://biketravellers.com/bicipedia/Mike_Ferrentino
Related Links
http://www.santacruzbikes.com/home/ http://www.bikemag.com/ http://www.singletrackworld.com/
