Losinj International Cup Report and WC 2018 Course Sneak Peek

While the 2017 World Cup season has officially started this week with the opening round at Lourdes, attention is still focused on the controversy surrounding the Croatian track of Losinj, which will hold the UCI World Cup opening round in 2018.

Last weekend the Losinj International DHI C1 Cup took place as a pilot run for the track and for the organisers in preparation for next year. Josh Lowe for Kona bikes was out there to test it out

Firstly, it’s difficult to not appreciate the amazing location! It’s rare that you ever get to go to a Croatian Island, let alone to race your bike. The track snakes its way down the hill in-between century old stonewalls, which although is quite a refreshing change, is also pretty crazy in case you come off-line. In fact the whole track just seems to be one massive, sharp rock garden with quite a few lines open.

Although there aren’t many traditional corners, the helmet cameras and videos really don’t do it justice in terms of its gradient and difficulty…many people and especially wheels came up short against it!

It is not clear exactly what is going to happen at the bottom of the track, yet it is certain that for the 2018 World Cup there will be an Urban Section to finish. This race had about 30-40 second urban section in-between some pretty narrow urban walls. It will be interesting to see if they add anything interesting into this part of the track as during the pilot race they just had some pretty standard flat urban corners. Although this is a refreshing change, there has already been some controversy as to whether or not this is the direction Downhill wants to go. If changes are made to this section (wall-rides or some jumps maybe) then it could work really well but it needed something extra.

So although the track is pretty different to anything we have previously seen on the World Cup scene, overall impressions are pretty high and a lot higher than expectations coming into the race. Secondly it’s pretty cool to see the World Cup venues moving to different locations across the globe, especially such an amazing place like Losinj. Maybe this will give rise to other venues appearing on the Word Cup scene?

Words, photos and Vid by Josh lowe

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