The unthinkable has happened and the greatest racer of all time, Greg Minnaar, and his team of 16 years, the Santa Cruz Syndicate have parted ways. Is the Syndicate letting 42 year old Minnaar walk the downhill racing equivalent to the Patriots letting Tom Brady go to the Buccaneers and if so, are we about to watch Minaar make history yet again in 2024?

Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure: If Greg still wants to race, he’s still going to have a chance of winning.

The prevalent rumor is that Greg will be racing for Norco in 2024 and that they will be working on a new prototype high pivot downhill race bike.

Minnaar has expressed some mixed feelings about high pivots in the past. In the development video for the new V10 – the bike Greg has been on and been a part of developing for the last 16 years – the team experimented with some mid pivot options and Greg said he loved the feel of them but they did not translate to performance on the track.

He didn’t have anything bad to say necessarily about how the mid pivot idler bike felt, but he was confident that he preferred the standard suspension layup better and would, at the time, be continuing to push forward with the V10 we see today.

It will be interesting to see how Greg adjusts to whatever Norco has been cooking up and how it and he will perform in 2024.

One thing we can say confidently though is that you could put Greg Minnaar on a shopping cart and he’d still probably land top 10.

Some of Greg’s career highlights are:

4-time world champ

4 world championship silver medals

3 World Cup overall winner

1 overall win in four-cross

15 individual World Cup wins

A whopping 60 World Cup podiums