Dirt: How did you first get started on two wheels?

ACC: I was really young and wanted to do the same as my two big brothers and my dad, so from six years old I raced BMX. Sometimes we’d all get home with the full collection of four trophies, so that was cool – one for all the family! Ten years later, when I was on the French team, most of the men were Sunn Chipie riders like me, and they’d already tried mountain biking (which was new to France at the time). Those guys told me there was a World Championship that year (1993) at Metabief, and they were all pushing me to try to do it, to go to the Worlds and have a go. So I went, and that’s how it all started.

I won the Junior category.

It was my second race actually. I had to race the French Cup before to qualify, but I only finished second in my first race. I didn’t know how to shift gears yet (laughs)…I raced on a Sunn Revolt hardtail, with flat pedals at that point. It had a small fork with very little suspension, I don’t remember how much. At this time most of the bikes were hardtails, even in DH.

I didn’t really think about it. I was just having fun on my bike and doing what I liked the most. I loved jumping, so I wanted to do jumps all the time and get better at that. The racing was all so new, I was learning more and more after every run. I’d find something out, something new to try, and I knew I could go faster, so I went back up to the top and practiced what I learned in the last run and went faster. I never expected too much, because I came from BMX and I was against these girls like Kim Sonnier and Missy Giove I’d only seen in the mountain bike magazines, so when I won my first World Cup season overall I was really surprised, I couldn’t believe it. In my mind these other girls were the stars of the sport, not me. At the start of 1994, at Cap D’Ail, I won, and at this race I understood I was competitive. I knew I could do something in mountain biking, some wins, so I stopped racing BMX. Once you realise you can win you learn how to do it. You get to know how to control all the parameters that can happen in DH – mechanical issues, crashing in practice, injuries, and lots of things.

Well I got good at controlling these parameters. Sure I won all the World Championships, but I didn’t win at every single round of the World Cup races.

Inside the Sunn team we used to say it was more like a ‘sect’. We were very professional and organised early on; close friends that rode together all the time, so I learned a lot from the guys. We always stayed independently of the French National team and none of us spoke English at that time, so we kept to ourselves and did our own thing. Francois Gachet (who was already a champion) was helping manage us, and I saw how to be serious, how to get fit, how to eat well.

I think a good thing about my career is I got a basis for my success back when DH tracks were a lot longer. Sometimes they were ten minutes long, so there was a lot of pedalling, a long time on the track, and you needed to be fit and strong. I did all this when I was young, and I still take the benefit of this base level today.

What made you win so much? Mental strength?

For sure, it is a lot to do with mental strength, but I work a lot everywhere. I work on the bike preparation, I trained a lot and I’m still training a lot. From my education, and my parents, when I was growing up, I could do what I wanted, but I was always taught that it was hard work to achieve your goals, so I worked hard. So if I want to do well at a World Championships I won’t take my bike out one month before the race and say, “OK I can ride, I can race”, I will prepare a lot, and when you know that you’ve done all things at 100% you can feel a lot more confident about how it will finish.

Well that’s the strange thing, I have always got super–nervous before races. Even the smallest little races. So nervous that it’s funny for me to think how I get. My trainer Stephane (Girard) knows how I am just before the start, but nobody from outside could ever see it. I often even puke before the race I am so nervous!

Yes sure (laughs) and the girls never knew. Ha, yes, I used to go off to the side to do it. I’m still very bad like this today, nerves still plague me.

Well I try and get it together just before the start, and then once the beeps go, it takes me a few seconds to get into the groove and I’m fine. You see some riders and it looks like they are already going 100% right off the line, but I needed a few seconds to compose, to steady myself. In the first turn or the first technical part I prefer sometimes to ride slower and be smooth, to increase my confidence for the rest of the track.

Err…I can tell you the worst that’s for sure…Les Gets 2004. I had this stupid crash and broke my shoulder trying a new line like one hour before the race. I was feeling so good up to that point, so well prepared and it was in France, in front of my family. That was one mistake I shouldn’t have made, my worst souvenir of the Worlds…(laughs). The best moment is the Olympic BMX victory. It represents a lot for me, and for all the people that helped me. Even though I may be famous in the mountain biking world, I’m not in France. Everything is about other sports like soccer, but it’s the Olympics, everybody is looking at you and it’s good not only for you but for your sport too. So it’s good for BMX, but it’s also good for DH as well because people see that I am a mountain biker.

Yes, this is true; also for some of the French girls that had a chance to win, they were too disturbed by what had happened to me and what that meant for them. Probably that is the difference between the others and me. When I’m racing, when you take a start you can’t tell yourself you’re not going to win when there is always a possibility. Nobody is unbeatable, but when I was winning the other girls always thought it was not possible, so if you start and you think it’s not possible then for sure it’s a lot more difficult…