Mountain Bike Racers Build Downhill Course With Bobcat Equipment

Sean Leader expertly navigates his excavator down a steep, tree-covered incline. The day’s challenge? Carving a new section of mountain bike trail into the mountainside. 

Sean, along with his business partner and fellow professional racer Neko Mulally, has spent the last few years taming a former grassroots training ground for bike racers. The pair has been clearing trees, fixing slopes and installing drainage with the help of compact equipment. 

The result is Windrock Bike Park, eastern Tennessee’s premier downhill mountain bike course, which offers 2,300 feet of vertical descent in the mountainous region outside the town of Oliver Springs. 

“I grew up 20 minutes from the park and started racing at all these other places,” Sean says. “The mountains we have here in the Southeast are just as good, if not better, than anything I’ve ever been to before. It was just a matter of getting all the right people together to say, ‘Let’s make this happen.’”