With eight Swiss championship titles, one European Championship gold and one silver medal, five top 10 places in the World Cup - including two top 5s, one sixth and one 13th place in the World Championships, Nick Beer is the most successful Swiss downhill rider. However, even as a junior, the Bernese Oberlander was considered a great young hope. A serious crash at the Downhill World Cup in Les Deux Alpes and four subsequent operations left Beer unable to compete for a while. After two years away from racing, he returned to downhill racing. He was not considered to have great chances, as it is rather rare for a rider to become fast again after such a lengthy injury. Nick Beer hardly seemed to care. Back in 2007, in his second elite year, he won the first of his seven elite Swiss championship titles.

After three years with the Devinci Global Racing Team, the rider from the Bernese Oberland took a different path - a rockier one. Beer, who had been riding for the Radon Magura Factory team since 2015, was still a professional on the starting grid, but he also had the double burden of having just started studying to become a mechanical engineer. He managed the workload of both activities for two years, but his results increasingly suffered as a result. His collarbone fracture last spring made it even more difficult to regain his former strength.As Nick writes on Facebook, he sees it as the right time to hang up his downhill bike after the last big races of the current season. From then on, his focus will be one hundred percent on his studies - but he will remain loyal to mountain biking even without a race number.