Almost immediately as the race starts an amorphous of riders forms that slither down the hill in a kicking, screaming, clutching and giggling pile. It’s an odd site to behold; normally solitary bicycles and their riders all becoming this seething bubble. After the hilarity, there’s a moment when the fear hits, it’s not the same kind of fear as when you are about to do some big jump or tackle a steep descent, no it’s a wariness of others. I can only imagine it’s what a mouse must feel when a cat is playing with it and has no intention of a swift kill. I knew none of these other riders wanted to kill me or had particularly picked me out as a target for overtaking yet I felt as if any one of them could do me the most terrible harm if I wasn’t wary of them.

For all the aggression at the top of the slopes, with battles waged, sliding bikes and the occasional rider so caught up in the moment they shout and swear so much that it becomes an unspoken but shared joke amongst the surrounding pack; the finish area is a picture of serene bonhomie only occasionally spiked with a shrill curse from a straggler crossing the line. Rolling into this throng, it’s an abundance of stories and tales. All the different reasons for being here and varying versions of the shared experience. Entering into it the stories come thick and fast and will give you a better impression than my generalities and encounters trickling down at the back.

Joe Lintl, an Austrian currently living in the States made the trip over here to do it for the fifth time. “I guess you hate it after three days because everything starts hurting, but once you’ve done the qualifying and finished well or make it to the finals, it’s really just the best thing you could possibly do. You always come back for more abuse. I’m always riding pretty well, the first three days, in fact you ride too much when you’re here for a week. I should ride less, I guess pros do that but I can’t because I’m here for fun. You ride too much and you suffer pain, that’s what you do.”

Another expat was Brit Ben Thompson, who lives in the far more conveniently placed (for this race) location of Bourg St Maurice, got caught up in the glacier carnage I witnessed and explained the experience to me, “It was pretty interesting at the start, everyone just had a massive pile up in the left hand corner, dunno, hundred people, hundred and twenty people. By the time that all finished, most of the field had disappeared down the glacier. You can’t do anything, you’ll try and get on your feet and your bike will still be sliding, then somebody else will take you out from behind and there’s people trying to climb over the top of you and you’re trying to climb over the top of them to get back on your bike.”

It seemed that even if the first mass pile up was avoided, riders still weren’t in the clear on the glacier as Russell Turner from Plymouth encountered, “I started towards the back, had a good start, got over to the right on the first steep section so managed to pass quite a few people who crashed on the left. Thought I saw a nice straight line coming down the second steep section. It’s quite long so you can build up some good speed, so I clipped–in and went for it. Then two people gradually came together, like slow motion, I thought I was nearly going to make it. They just came together and I clipped… I don’t know if I hurt them. I didn’t really see them afterwards because I went flying over the bars. I must have gone twenty, thirty metres from my bike. I was trying to stand up all dazed, trying to make my way back to my bike while I’ve got other riders flying at me. It’s just absolutely insane. It’s my first go at it and that’s the bit that I was frightened of and it delivered.”

Californian Kyle Warner came in a strong 34th and appeared enthralled by the race, “We came out here for the first time, it’s a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience and I’d never done a mass start so figured I might as well try it. It was good, it was scary. I came off the glacier in like fifteenth and then crashed, got passed by a bunch of people. Then had to try and pass riders all the way down, it was pretty gnarly. I normally race Enduro in the U.S., this is way better, this is what it should be. Definitely back next year. They don’t have any mass starts in the U.S., too much insurance, people crash a lot.” The draw to this race is worldwide for those reasons, walking through I noticed just how many nationalities where here, a point taken up by Vincent Hauleg from Metabief. Speaking in a manner of unfinished sentences that only the French can make work, his emphatic excitement that morphed one sentence into another was only topped by the pink rabbit outfit he was wearing. “You must come here to know what it is. If you don’t, you can’t say, ‘Ah, Megavalanche this… Megavalanche that… ’. No you must ride one time and after, you must come again. It’s too good, you’re two hundred people and this is a war, on the snow, for your life, if somebody fall in front of you, you don’t want to crash them… it’s a war. There’s a lot of the best downhill riders, you have all the best Enduro riders, British riders are also on the front line, there’s 26 different nationalities competing. People have come from everywhere, so we can say it’s an international race. I’ve done this race for ten or twelve years, it’s too good, the best you can find.”