In the women’s field Rachel Atherton was also cutting quite a figure in B practice – her pace and line choice through the top rocks was completely different to the rest of the girls as practice began and causing many of the on track spectators and media to comment how she was riding ‘like one of the guys’. Having followed her down many a rock and root strewn track this winter, nothing on this track would have been a shock for her, and her comfort in these conditions was impressive to see.

For the B practice group, their sessions are early (typically starting at 8-8.30am) which brings many challenges in itself: to begin with you have to get up very early; up at 6am every day to eat, travel to race site and warm up prior to getting on the downhill bike.

Along with this, the conditions are at their least favourable. Even on a dry day it is generally very cold in the mountains at 8am and there is often dew on the ground to grease the roots, and on a wet day, the slop and mud hasn’t been cleared from the racing line, so it is down to the girls, juniors and lower ranked men to do the riskier work. Track conditions are arguably harder than the top ranked elite men will ride, and further away from the expected race conditions as their race runs are normally between 1-2.30pm.

The A practice allowed us to see some more creative lines and bolder choices from the worlds very best. A number of lines stood out as only being nailed perfectly by a few riders, and when you watch the footage, they don’t look like anything difficult! The cameras really do flatten the terrain, as some of the rock hops and drops are truly impressive to witness with huge skill and risk involved.

The pinpoint accuracy of the top guys is incredible. It isn’t just the case of doing the hard line once, but over and over again perfectly; I remember a golf coach explaining to me the very best golfers always leave the same exact size divot in the practice range; every shot the same over and over…

Having watched the juniors, women and then men through this section, 3 riders stood out on that run, in those conditions. Gee Atherton, Josh Bryceland and Loic Bruni looked markedly faster and more comfortable on their lines, and before seeing any results I’d put them down as my top 3. Interestingly when I got down and looked over the results, the top 3 were: Loic, Josh and Gee. It made me wonder how critical that section of track was, or was this 15 seconds of viewing merely indicative of how they were approaching the rest of the track?

Come race day, the weather conditions were very different – the track was drying and becoming sticky, claggy, and filling tyres up during the very short morning pactice. With only 1 hour of practice, you have to have a clear goal of how many runs you want to get in. 1 run or 2 during that window? What do you try in terms of lines, or bike set up, or do you merely use the runs as a warm up?

For the juniors, the window between the end of practice and their race runs is quite small, but this increases for the women, and for a top seeded elite males, they could be racing five and a half hours after their last practice run! On a day such as this where the sun was out and the temperature was rising, the track was rapidly drying and becoming firmer.