Venue & season

The voice of the races: announcers, commentators and Peter Graves

Venue & season · By the editors of Ligne de pente · Published 2026-11-04

Spectators at a mountain bike race see only a small part of the course. What links the start grid, a rock garden halfway up the mountain and the finish line is a voice over the loudspeakers. This page looks at the job of race announcing and commentary, and at one of its long-serving practitioners connected with the 2010 championships.

Two different jobs

The site announcer speaks to the crowd at the venue. He or she introduces the riders on the grid, follows the race from timing screens, radio reports and video feeds, reads intermediate times, and keeps people informed when the leaders are out of sight in the forest. Between races the announcer handles safety messages, schedule changes and podium ceremonies, in more than one language at an international event in Québec.

The television or streaming commentator speaks to a remote audience that sees only the pictures. The work is closer to storytelling: explaining tactics, introducing riders' backgrounds, filling the gaps when the cameras lose the race. Some people do both jobs in the course of a career, and the best ones prepare for days, with notes on every rider in the field.

Why the voice matters in mountain biking

Cross-country laps last many minutes and a downhill run lasts several; for long stretches nothing happens in front of any given spectator. Good announcing turns a series of riders passing by into a race people can follow. It also matters for safety: when a crash blocks a section or a storm approaches, the public address system is the fastest way to reach thousands of people.

Peter Graves

During the 2010 season the championship website published a blog by Peter Graves, an American sports announcer from Vermont. According to the biography published with that blog, Graves had called races at Mont-Sainte-Anne over many years, including the 1998 world championships, and had worked as an announcer from the earliest days of international mountain biking, among them the first world championships at Durango in 1990. The same biography mentioned a background in Nordic skiing and broadcast work at several Olympic Games.

We cite these points as they were presented in 2010; we have not been able to check each of them against an independent source, and we do not reproduce or paraphrase his posts here. Readers interested in his work should look for his own published commentary. Ligne de pente has no connection with Peter Graves and does not speak for him.

Following the 2010 season

The season that led to the Mont-Sainte-Anne championships began in April at Dalby Forest in England and ran through six World Cup rounds in each discipline. Our article on the start of the 2010 World Cup season follows that road to the Worlds, and every podium of the championships is listed separately.