Tough at the Top – World Cup Diaries

World Cup Diaries

I hate getting up in the morning. I always have. I Always will. But when you wake up, spurred on by the knowledge the first world cup is the weekend, it does take the edge off.

This season I’ll be working for FS Patrol Funn, a new outfit orchestrated by Harry Molloy. I’m not going to bore you with the bullshit “racing program to push the limits of our sport” sort of spiel but what I would say is that Harry is a great bloke with his head firmly screwed on. He’s both liked and respected, inside and out of the tape for good reason. When he asked me to come onboard I was stoked. I’ve always been able to spot grit and determination and he’s got it in spades. That was my only requirement for working for him – he had to want it.

Also on the team are Italian national champ Veronika Widmann and all round good bloke, absolute shredder and human golden retriever Bryn Dickerson. I rode with Bryn when he came to visit me in Queenstown. Mutual friends had spoken so highly of him and he really lived up to the billing. Easy going, smart with a approachable and communicative manner. IE. The exact sort of person who’s bike you’re happy to work on.

When I first met Bryn we just went for a casual trail ride – holy shit this guy hauls. He made me feel like an absolute schoolboy on trails that I know like the back of my own hands. No, more than that. I knew those trails like your tongue knows the edging of your teeth. If there was a twig that had moved I would have known about it and I could not shake him for the life of me. Life lesson #429 There’s always somebody faster.

Harry picked me up from the Airport, we span a few yarns about our respective off seasons on the way to the hotel and then we went up to meet everyone and get the team in the same room for the first time. I hadn’t met Veronika before. She greeted me with a smile and a handshake at the door and we immediately started talking about plans, both long term and what the season would entail and the very short term – food.

That next morning we went to registration and got the travelling workshop set up. The bikes were running mint and everyone just wanted to get going. We walked the track and the three of them were so excited. We we scoping lines and comparing to them from everyones memory from previous seasons. Everyone knows how steep some sections of the trail are but what the cameras don’t do justice is how many places there are to snag rocks, catches pedals and eat shit in a million variety of flavours. A proper downhill track.
Practice, oh practice… what a time to be alive. The early morning snow melted off pretty quick and everyone got going. Harry was lingering quite a bit. He of course wasn’t unwelcome but it seemed a little strange. I knew he was feeling unwell but I wasn’t prepared for the quite literal shit storm the horizon. I’m not talking a twelve hour bout of discomfort, I’m talking rusty water and fire hydrants. He got on the bike and soldiered on. What a trooper.

Sometimes, and much to my shame, I’ll hear that somebody was “ill” or “under the weather” as an explanation for a performance not being up to what is expected and I’ve thought “Yeah, but really, couldn’t they just muscle it out?”. I was thinking this right up until the point that I was woken up by what I can only describe like distant gunfire in the night on the morning before qualies. Like a firing squad hellbent on getting the job done it completely wrote off Harry’s weekend. I felt so bad for him. He’d put so much into this. This team was all his making and to have to miss the first race was hugely frustrating for him. He tried to qualify in the short intervals of the aforementioned shitstorm but it wasn’t to be. At one point, half joking, me and Veronika reassured him that if worst came to worst his DH pants would mean that nobody would be any the wiser and he could just ride straight to the pits. Well, maybe to the pits via the bike wash for a hose down.

Bryn was feeling great on the bike. His eyes buzzed like water on power cables. You could tell he was ready and was reaping the benefits of so much hard work over winter. His excitement was spilling over into his subconscious and sleep talking was becoming both accustomed to and expected. Qualifying is a difficult one and a cruel mistress. The riders want to be near boiling point whilst being careful not to boil over completely. If you do find yourself in such a predicament and aren’t a protected rider it’ll be your weekend wrapped up and a long journey home to think about it. Especially for Bryn. The plane ride home to New Zealand takes a while at the best of times – throw in a jar for of thoughts of what could have been and it’ll only add thinking time. He was charging hard in his run and found himself staring down at a razor edged rock at 30KPH. Maybe a millisecond or an inch of give either way and maybe it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. But sadly, for us at least, the rock fared the better. It caved in his rim in a concise but devastating impact. Things like that are hard. I don’t think it was our rims that were the problem nor is there any fault at Bryns door. I think it was just 85KG of fire breathing, hard charging kiwi that hadn’t had a problem all weekend but found himself dry on luck when it counted.

Veronika was the only one of our three that qualified. She was happy to get through but, by her own admission, her run was solid if not spectacular. She blew up a turn before one of the big doubles and didn’t have the speed and lost out further on the following straight. She could feel the seconds slipping through her fingers and she gave it everything trying to get her momentum back.

Her race run was in high wind and we had struggled with set up all weekend. Lourdes is a track that demands the most out of your setup and any smalls issues will be cruelly exposed and painted as cracks in the foundation of your equipment. We couldn’t get the forks to sit up how we wanted on the rough, steep and largely unforgiving track. It cost her time and 13th was a result that she knows she can build on.
I remember standing at the top with her before her finals run. The wind was ferocious. Genuinely gnarly. I reassured her that the jumps would be fine and to just play it by ear. Just as I was really making my point and she was in agreement, another rider came up and said something along the lines of “Knights of Columbus, people are dropping harder than a soprano choir boy’s testes on that last jump”. Apparently the course sweeper had laid it as flat as a pancake and had injured his hand pretty severely. The next rider had a similar fate. We got a call from the finish area to say that even the announcer was advising people to let their teams to know – the jump wasn’t on. Veronika was in the start gate, I quickly passed on the message. To my absolute delight she completely ignored me and sent that mother on special delivery. What a hero.