Roll up, roll up – beginner’s guide to Hafjell here!

With the excitement of the World Champs over, it’s time for the last round of the World Cup. The first ever World Cup round in Norway (in the Dirt office memory, anyway), it’s all new and confusing. Here’s the down-low:

Where is Norway? (Just in case the primary school geography lessons didn’t work)

And where’s this ‘Hafjell’ then?

Potted history of the bike park:
“Hafjell Bike Park is renowned as the best Bike Park for downhill riding in Norway and some of the bike trails have a vertical drop of 830m, varies in difficulty with jumps and drops and easier lines for the beginners.
Since its inception in 2001, Hafjell Bike Park has exploded into a world class bike park. It started with the “Wednesday Club”, a group of local riders doing shuttle runs in the area that soon became tired of blasting down the Hafjell fire-roads and craved more demanding trails. In Feb, 2002 a meeting between Snorre Pedersen and the manager of Hafjell Alpine Centre, Geir Olsen occurred, resulting in support from Hafjell Alpine Centre, ending the Illegal trail building.
Snorre Pedersen is the architect of the Park, and back in 2003 he started as a pioneer, digging and constructing the NC-trail, together with the help of volunteers putting in hundreds of hours of manual labour. Hafjell did on this trail later on host a National Downhill race in 2004. This was the start of the designing and transforming of the hills of Hafjell.”

Important info:
• There are three bars in Hafjell – Café 94, Ryk&Reis, and Woody’s.
• Price of a pint here is expensive! Between £6 and £7 a pint.
• Average temperature in September is between 7 and 15 degrees.
• Average rainfall in September is 81mm.

The schedule. The race is on Saturday this time. And rather unluckily it looks like rain for Saturday.

National dress:

A weather forecast for the next few days:

The track:

The points standings so far:

The facts:
Population: 5,002,942
Area: 125,181 sq mi.
Capital and largest city: Oslo
Language: Norwegian
Monetary Unit: Krone
Religion: 78.9% Evangelical Lutheran
Literacy Rate: 100%
Government: Constitutional Monarchy (King Harald V)

A helmetcam of the track, thanks to the recent Scandi cup:

Some ‘traditional’ Norwegian music:

Some 80’s pop for you, A haaaa!:

To top it off, here’s Monty Python’s take on Norway. You would think he was joking.