Red Bull Erzbergrodeo 2026
Ideation & Formats, Social Planning, On-Site Content Production, Live & Real-Time Social & Reporting
Wheelies and wellies
Once a year, an iron-ore mine in Styria turns into a racetrack. In June 2026, three of our team spent five days in the thick of it. We brought cameras, a plan and wellies. The wellies turned out to be essential.
The race is Red Bull Erzbergrodeo, one of the toughest events in extreme enduro, and this was its 30th edition. Over 1,000 riders take on the steep slopes and loose rock of the Erzberg, literally the 'ore mountain', and most never even see the finish line.
We were there to create social content for Red Bull Austria and Red Bull Erzbergrodeo, and everything around the race was fair game. At Erzberg, 'everything' covers a lot of ground: skydivers delivering the start flag, a bathtub on wheels, a grown man in a pink bunny suit and beer benches repurposed as a breakneck slide. Whatever we made in the middle of all that still had to be on brand. The conditions don't make any of it easy. Mud gets in everywhere, and motorbike engines aren't known for their subtlety.
A plan built to bend
Nine years at Erzberg have taught us to embrace the craziness, so we built flexibility into our content plan. Athletes have little time once racing starts, and the finish line belongs to Red Bull TV's interviews, so Thursday and Friday were our window for pre-shoots. Every other format was built to be shot on the fly, with kit light enough to follow the action wherever it went. Minimal setup, maximum output.
One of those pre-shoots was a sound check with a twist: Manuel 'Letti' Lettenbichler, going for his fifth straight win, rated the engine sounds of bikes from past decades. We came up with the idea, wrote the caption and posted it on race day to build the hype. He won that day, too. The clip became our top performer for Red Bull Austria, with 612,000 views.
Pop a wheelie?
On the mountain, we worked alongside the event team and kept both channels fed in real time, from TikTok Lives at the start line to stories cut from the footage once the racing was done.
The pre-shoot window had been tight, and time ran out for the shoot we’d planned with Letti. So we set up where the riders were already heading: the prologue, the qualifying run that decides where they line up on race day. There, we held up a piece of cardboard with 'Wheelie für ein Red Bull' (a wheelie for a Red Bull) scrawled on it as they came through. As content ideas go, it was about as rough and ready as the race itself.
It doesn't take much to coax riders at Erzberg into popping a wheelie. A can of Red Bull, it turns out, will do. The format neatly sidestepped a staged product shot: the cans went straight into athletes' hands – the classic Red Bull moment. Last time we checked, the clip had over 400,000 views.
By the time we'd packed up and dug ourselves out of the mud, we'd made 83 pieces of content across both channels and racked up over 14 million views. Not bad for three people in wellies. Take a bow, Sofia, Marlies and Fabi.
Services we provided:
Photographer Credit: Joerg Mitter / Red Bull Content Pool & Philip Platzer / Red Bull Content Pool