Mountain Bike World Series Hits Adirondacks
This past weekend, the WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series came to the Adirondacks. Mt. Van Hoevenberg hosted the Cross-Country World Cup Races, and Whiteface Mountain held the Downhill Races.
The professional Downhill races took place on Saturday. The sun was shining, the leaves were changing, but the ground was so dry I couldn’t even count the number of times I blew my nose and pulled the tissue away to find dirt stains. Emmons Whited ’27 noted that the conditions were tough. It was “super loose and dusty, so the track was changing a bunch – each lap it kinda got worse and worse for the riders as holes and trenches were dug out,” he said. Whited also noted that he thought Whiteface did a great job with the venue.
“I really liked the course; it was way wider than a typical UCI DH course, so there were a lot of line choices that made for exciting racing,” said Whited. Despite the wide course allowing for a breadth of approaches to the race, the results were very tight – the time difference between the first and second place for the Men’s Elite DHI Final racers was 0.713 seconds. The second and third place racers were just 0.157 seconds apart.
Luke Meier-Smith, an Australian racing for the Giant Factory Off-Road Team, took first place with a time of 3:05.946. Second and third place were taken by two members of the Canyon CLLCTV Factory Team. Luca Shaw, an American racer, came in second with a time of 3:06.659. Henri Kiefer, a German racer, came in at 3:06.816.
As for the Women’s Elite DHI Final, the first-place spot went to Valentina Höll, an Austrian racer for YT Mob. Höll had a time of 3:30.422. Next came the French racer for Commencal/Muc-Off by Riding Addiction team, Myriam Nicole, coming in at 3:33.237. Lastly, the New Zealand racer for Trek Factory,
Sacha Earnest, landed third place with a time of 3:33.271.
As for the spectator portion, the race was a very interactive experience. While the ski lifts were used to shuttle people up the mountain, the cost was $20 per person, and to access the technical portions in the woods, some light hiking was required. So, depending on how you approached it, getting to all the best viewing spots was an exercise and a race in itself. It was a gorgeous day to do it, though, and if you dismissed the chairlift altogether, I’d say you can basically cross off hiking a high peak from your bucket list.
The crowd was alive with the sounds of cowbells, horns, and the occasional chainsaw (minus the blade), which I was quite surprised to learn was a typical occurrence. A fellow newbie to mountain biking shared the same sentiments.
“Being entirely new to downhill racing, what I was most struck by was the spectator culture – particularly the various styles of noisemakers,” said James Fry ’27. Fry noted that “this crowd really went all out,” and it was different from other races he has attended, such as the Chicago Marathon. “The ones which stood out the most to me were those constructed of miscellaneous bicycle parts, airhorns strapped to impact wrenches, and of course, the bladeless chainsaws,” said Fry.
