I think it’s getting better. The thing that gets me down is the coverage of women’s racing, I think that’s disastrous, pretty awful. I think it’s pretty disrespectful and pretty lame: a paragraph for the whole of the women’s World Cup. You just think ‘I would kick your ass’.
I read in an interview somewhere and you mentioned the possibility of changing discipline or sport. Was that just a fleeting comment or did you mean it seriously?It wasn’t said just in passing.
Brownie was saying you’d rank as a world–class athlete.Yeah he dribbled something about that the other day, I was wondering what he was on about. Like I said before, I love mountain biking and I love racing downhill. I’m good at it you know, and obviously it’s hard and it’s a challenge and stuff, but I don’t want to get to the end of my able career and this to have been the only thing that I’ve done. Whatever that is, wherever that goes, I’m pretty keen to do something else.
Is there a sport or discipline in particular you’ve thought of?Hmm, not really… obviously two wheels would be better than anything else. There’re a couple of things that I’ve definitely got my eye on, but who knows?
Go on.No! And I don’t think that you can escape the fact that no matter what anyone says, everyone as an athlete dreams of being in the Olympics, and over the last few years that’s something that’s come in. I don’t want it to, but that is something that I feel quite strongly about now. I wish that it wasn’t like that, but…
So do you go to the track (velodrome) much?Well we’ve been a couple of times this winter and I love it, it’s amazing. I just like the fact that it’s almost the opposite of downhill. All that matters is how f–king fast you can go around the track. Nothing really changes apart from what you can put out with your body. I think that for a girl to do it is amazing, because to work, to get your body into that shape. For me I love being powerful, I love putting out a lot of power, but for the downhill track there’s a point when it’s detrimental, there’s no point in putting out a certain amount of watts out the start gate, because you’ll just fall off in the first turn.
Track gets a lot of focus on it in the media doesn’t it?Imagine the interest or how it would help mountain biking as a sport if (I’m not saying this is going to happen) but, say I went to track and became quite good at it and quite successful, then obviously my background’s in downhill and people would see it more, and it would definitely generate more interest in it. It’s really a logistical nightmare to get into it, because of this four–year cycle with the Olympics really bothers people…
So there we have it, Rachel Atherton, the most successful British mountain biker of all time, goes into the 2014 season on the back of her best two years of racing to date, and seemingly with as much motivation as ever. Complacent? Hardly. I have a funny feeling that we will be seeing Atherton on the top step of the podium for a long time to come. Whether that will be at World Cup Downhill races we will have to wait and see.
