I crashed at Albstadt in 2019 with bare hands. Not intentionally I’d torn a glove on a rock garden during the practice lap and figured I could get through the race without it.
Forty minutes later, I was picking gravel out of my palm with tweezers while my mechanic tried not to say “I told you so.”
The abrasion wasn’t serious, but my grip was compromised for three weeks afterward, which meant three weeks of modified training during a critical build phase.
All because I didn’t want to lose ninety seconds swapping to my backup pair.
Gloves occupy a strange position in the hierarchy of XC equipment.
We obsess over suspension kinematics, tire pressure to the half-PSI, saddle position down to the millimeter. But gloves? Most of us grab whatever’s in the bag.
I was that rider for years.
It took accumulating enough small lessons: the Albstadt crash, a near-miss on a wet descent at Nove Mesto, countless moments of compromised control I only recognized in retrospect before I started thinking about gloves the way I think about tires or suspension setup.
The Interface Problem
The connection between your hands and your bike is, in some ways, the most consequential interface in mountain biking.
Your tires contact the ground, but your hands contact everything brakes, shifters, grips, the bar itself during hard impacts.
At the World Cup level, where finishing positions often separate by seconds across ninety minutes of racing, the quality of that connection compounds across thousands of micro-decisions.
During a typical XCO race, I’ll modulate my brakes hundreds of times not grabbing handfuls of lever, but feathering, adjusting, managing traction through variable surfaces.
Each of those inputs depends on tactile feedback traveling from the lever through the glove to my fingertips.
A glove that deadens that feedback, even slightly, means I’m either braking too early (losing time) or too late (losing traction). Multiply that across a full race and you’re looking at measurable time gaps.
Then there’s grip security during sustained efforts.
When you’re five laps into a World Cup, your hands are sweating, your forearms are pumped, and your ability to maintain precise control depends partly on how well your glove manages moisture.
The palm material makes a genuine difference here.
Clarino synthetic leather maintains consistent grip whether hands are dry or saturated there’s a reason it shows up in mid-range and premium gloves across manufacturers.
Cheaper mesh palms can feel great initially but become unreliable once moisture enters the equation.
Silicone printing patterns add another variable.
Some manufacturers apply aggressive texturing to the palm and fingers; others use minimal printing, prioritizing bar feel over grip augmentation.
Neither approach is objectively superior; it depends on your grip style, your handlebar setup, and personal preference.
But the difference becomes most apparent in wet conditions, where extra traction can mean the difference between confident braking and sketchy lever control.
Environment-Specific Tradeoffs
Heat
Most of my racing happens between May and September, which means heat management dominates my glove decisions for the majority of the season.
The thinnest, most breathable gloves ultralight mesh constructions weighing under 30 grams offer incredible bar feel.
I can sense everything through them: grip texture, lever position, even subtle vibrations that signal traction changes.
The Troy Lee Designs Air-style construction, with its micromesh fabric that feels almost non-existent, represents the extreme end of this philosophy.
But there’s a cost. Those ultralight gloves wear out fast sometimes within a single intensive season.
My mechanic’s perspective, informed by watching gloves deteriorate across entire team rosters, is that ultralight options rarely survive more than 50-60 rides before showing meaningful degradation.
More importantly, they offer essentially no protection against the accumulated small impacts of high-intensity riding.
I’ve settled into a pattern where I use ultralight gloves for certain courses and conditions, Albstadt’s fast, flowy terrain in dry conditions, for instance and mid-weight options when technical demands increase.
The Dakine Cross-X sits in my bag as a versatile option that handles most situations without excelling at any single one.
The choice gets complicated at altitude venues like Andorra or Lenzerheide, where morning temperatures can dip into the 40s Fahrenheit before climbing into the 70s by race time.
I’ve started races in windproof gloves and regretted it by lap three.
I’ve also started in ultralight gloves and spent the first two laps with numb fingers. There’s no perfect answer, just the least-bad option for your specific tolerance.
Wet Conditions
Rain changes everything about glove selection, and I’ll admit I still haven’t fully figured out the optimal approach.
The intuitive solution of waterproof gloves actually creates problems at race intensity.
Waterproof membranes prevent external water from getting in, but they also prevent internal moisture from getting out. Twenty minutes into a hard effort, your hands are swimming in their own sweat, which can compromise grip as badly as rain would have.
What I’ve landed on for most wet conditions is water-resistant rather than waterproof construction gloves with DWR coatings that shed light precipitation while still allowing some vapor transmission.
In sustained heavy rain, they eventually soak through. But they handle the variable conditions typical of European racing better than fully sealed alternatives.
Val di Sole in the rain is my mental reference point for wet-weather performance.
That course, with its rock gardens and off-camber roots, punishes any grip insecurity.
I bombed a line there in 2022 because my glove slipped on the brake lever at exactly the wrong moment, not a crash, but a blown corner that cost me positions. It was a glove I’d trusted in dry conditions but hadn’t properly tested wet.
Cold
Winter training and early-season racing introduce thermal considerations that override almost everything else.
When your fingers are numb, the bar feel becomes irrelevant. You can’t feel anything regardless of glove thickness.
The challenge is finding gloves warm enough to maintain dexterity without being so bulky they compromise control. I’ve tried heavily insulated winter options that felt like operating the bike through oven mitts.
On the other end, I’ve pushed lightweight gloves into temperatures where they had no business being, telling myself I’d warm up once the effort increased. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you spend ninety minutes with partially frozen fingers.
The insulation technology matters.
Polartec Alpha and similar high-loft synthetics provide meaningful warmth without excessive bulk. The Pearl Izumi Summit Alpha represents this approach well, offering warmth that extends into the low 30s Fahrenheit while maintaining enough dexterity for technical riding.
The lobster-style gloves where the ring and pinky fingers share a single compartment concentrate warmth in the less-critical fingers while preserving individual control for brake and shift levers.
I resisted them for years because they looked strange, but I’ve come around. For threshold efforts in near-freezing temperatures, they work better than I expected.
Windproofing adds another variable. Even modest air movement dramatically increases hand cooling.
Gloves with windproof membranes maintain warmth far better than breathable alternatives, even with similar insulation.
The Endura Singletrack Windproof exemplifies this minimal insulation but excellent wind protection, creating surprising warmth for its weight.
What I haven’t figured out is the transition zone between approximately 40 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit, where summer gloves feel inadequate but winter gloves feel excessive.
I typically carry two pairs during shoulder-season training and swap based on whether I’m ascending or descending. It’s inelegant but functional.
Fit and Human Factors
Glove sizing is less standardized than you might expect.
A large from one manufacturer fits differently than a large from another, sometimes dramatically so.
I wear large in most brands but medium in a few, and the difference isn’t predictable from specifications.
The measuring approach recommended by most manufacturers hand circumference at the knuckles provides a starting point but rarely tells the complete story.
Finger length matters independently of palm width. Some riders have broad palms with relatively short fingers; others have narrow palms with long fingers.
This is why I always test new glove models before committing.
Beyond sizing, there’s a fit philosophy. Some gloves are designed to fit snugly, almost like a second skin; others build in more room, prioritizing comfort over precision.
I’ve gravitated toward snugger fits over time. As a U23, I preferred roomier gloves that felt immediately comfortable. It took a coach pointing out how much material was bunching in my palms during technical sections before I reconsidered.
The snugger fit felt strange initially, almost constrictive but after a few rides, I couldn’t imagine going back.
The cuff design affects fit stability. Velcro closures allow precise adjustment but add bulk and create a failure point as the hook material degrades.
Elastic slip-on cuffs are simpler and more reliable long-term.
I’ve moved toward elastic cuffs for most applications, accepting slightly less customization in exchange for reduced fiddling.
Women’s-specific gloves exist and, from what I’ve heard from teammates, actually matter. The proportional differences between typical men’s and women’s hands mean that simply sizing down creates poor fit rather than appropriate fit.
Excess material bunches in the palm or extends past fingertips. If you’re a woman rider who’s been buying downsized men’s gloves and finding them vaguely wrong, women’s-specific options might resolve issues you’ve been unconsciously compensating for.
Durability and Lifecycle
At the professional level, glove durability matters less than you might assume; most of us receive enough pairs through sponsorship that we’re not wearing gloves until they fall apart.
But that abundance has taught me something about lifespan.
Even high-quality gloves degrade in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. The palm material thins gradually. Silicone printing wears down.
Elastic cuffs lose tension. Velcro closures accumulate dirt and lint that degrades holding power.
When I was younger and buying my own equipment, I ran gloves far longer than I should have, telling myself they were “broken in” when they were actually compromised.
A quality glove should last a full season of regular riding, but “regular riding” for a recreational rider means something different than for someone training twenty-plus hours weekly.
Care matters more than people realize. Sweat contains salts that degrade materials. Dirt accumulates in silicone textures.
Simply rinsing gloves after rides and allowing them to fully dry extends functional lifespan significantly. I’m not meticulous about much equipment maintenance, but I’ve become religious about not stuffing damp gloves into a bag to fester.
What I’ve Changed My Mind About
For years, I dismissed gloves with any knuckle protection as overkill for XC racing.
The added weight and reduced flexibility seemed unnecessary for a discipline where crashes happen less frequently than in downhill or enduro.
I associated protective gloves with park riders and considered them a sign of insufficient confidence.
I’ve revised that position. The protection isn’t primarily about crashes, it’s about the accumulated minor impacts that compound over a season.
Branch strikes across the knuckles, rock chips from the rider ahead, vibration absorption on rough terrain.
Gloves with modest TPU or foam protection don’t meaningfully compromise dexterity, and they reduce the low-level hand trauma I used to consider simply part of the sport.
I still don’t use heavily armored D3O-style gloves for XCO racing.
The weight and bulk genuinely do affect my feeling at that extreme but I’ve moved from ultralight-or-nothing to something in the middle.
The broader lesson is that equipment opinions formed early in a career deserve periodic reconsideration.
What made sense when I was fighting for fitness and every gram mattered might not make sense now.
The Limits of Optimization
I want to be honest about what gloves can and can’t do at the elite level. The differences between quality options are real but modest.
Switching from a mediocre glove to an excellent one might affect my performance measurably across a season, but it’s not going to transform my results.
The fundamentals fitness, technique, race craft dwarf equipment choices in their impact.
What gloves can do is remove friction from the system. A glove that fits well, grips consistently, and manages temperature appropriately becomes invisible during racing which is exactly what you want.
You’re not thinking about your hands; you’re thinking about the course, your competitors, your pacing. Equipment should enable performance, not demand attention.
The riders I know who stress excessively about glove selection are usually avoiding harder work elsewhere.
If you’re deliberating between three similar options, any of them will probably serve you well. Pick one, adapt to it, and focus on the things that actually determine race outcomes.
That said, ignoring gloves entirely treating them as interchangeable commodities also misses something.
The connection between your hands and your bike is too fundamental to leave to chance.
I still think about that Albstadt crash sometimes, not because it was dramatic but because it was so avoidable.
Ninety seconds to swap gloves would have cost me nothing in the final standings. Instead, I spent three weeks compensating for damaged hands, probably losing more fitness to modified training than I would have lost to a minute at the start.
Gloves won’t make you faster. But the wrong ones, or none at all, can definitely make you slower in ways that only become obvious after the fact.