Whenever you’re questioning, ‘Should a berm go here?’ the answer 99.9% of the time is YES.” We actually questioned if we should put it in the segment. “There was a kink in the radius I had to fix, and Olson wanted the exit to be a little wider, and it’s going to be on TV, so I just tried to make sure it looked good but also rode well. “I’m actually pretty proud of this berm,” says Didion. The crew put some serious TLC into machine building and hand finishing the berm. A rocky but fast singletrack tread descends into a tight right-hand corner, rumbles through a steep, off-camber, rooty section, and then shoots into a big berm that grabs riders and slings them back onto the course. The first segment the crew worked on is sure to spur some jaw-dropping riding. Three of the segments were original builds and one was an existing legacy trail that needed some adjustments. The Trail Solutions crew was tasked with creating four spicy sections that pass through mostly forested areas. World cup cross-country courses consist of a mash-up of trail styles: wide-open finish and start lines, feed zones, spectator hot spots, roomy passing sections, and, of course, the burly zones that test the riders’ technical mettle.
“We’ve had some great compliments on the course already. “The IMBA team went above and beyond what we asked them,” says Evan Cole, Snowshoe bike park manager.
“We pay for experienced and creative people so that they can do their thing-put their touch on it. We learned some things watching the team work that we sent back to our own crew,” says Ken Gaitor, vice president of mountain operations at Snowshoe. “We had a good experience working with IMBA. They left the rest up to the crew, allowing them to use the flow and form of the landscape to create a technically challenging, gritty course.
WEST VIRGINIA MOUNTAIN BIKE RACES FREE
It’s really cool to see them host the world cup and to have the chance to work on a world-class course.”Īlready familiar with Olson’s work, the Snowshoe operations team gave the trail builders free rein to create a crusher race course with really only one directive: The course should maintain the rocky, rooty feel of West Virginia’s terrain. “When I came to Snowshoe, they had a strong heritage of mountain biking, and we built on that. “It’s great to be part of the world cup returning to the U.S.,” says Olson. Both were glad to be back at Snowshoe working on this epic project. Olson had previously managed Snowshoe’s bike park, and Brackett, a former racer, had attended a mountain bike training camp at Snowshoe in his younger days. This fall, the final event of the 2019 Mercedes-Benz UCI Mountain Bike World Cup tour will take place in Snowshoe, West Virginia, the newest IMBA Ride Center, where an IMBA trail crew sculpted some divine lines for the cross-country race course earlier this summer.Ĭrew Manager Josh Olson and Trail Specialists Jess Didion and Tylor Brackett from Trail Solutions, IMBA’s trail building division, worked on the course.
WEST VIRGINIA MOUNTAIN BIKE RACES SERIES
played host to the mountain bike world tour, a multi-round mountain bike racing series sanctioned by the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale). Tickets are available for purchase at This year’s World Cup events at Snowshoe will take place September 13-19, 2021.Not since 2015, has the U.S. The World Cup Finals will be broadcast globally live on Red Bull TV. “It puts it in front of people who had not seen it before. “A lot of people were just blown away, saying this is a sport? This is really cool and that goes to show you how mountain biking is still growing and has a ways to go,” Cassell said. “We’re becoming a staple on the world cup circuit and that was the goal all along.”Īnd the competition features several Olympians including American favorite Kate Courtney and gold medalists Jolanda Neff and Tom Pidcock. But in the summer, folks are traveling from all over the world to mountain bike so I think that says a lot,” Cassell said. “In winter, folks travel from all over the region to ski at snowshoe. Organizers this week hope to solidify Snowshoe as a world-class destination for the sport. The 2019 races were the first of its kind to be held on American soil in half a decade and was later named PinkBike’s “Event of the Year”. “And when you have a World Cup race, people start saying hey maybe we should see what all the hype is about.” There’s a lot of folks who’ve never heard of Snowshoe or if they’ve heard of Snowshoe, they’ve never been to Snowshoe,” Cassell said. That’s something we demonstrated through this event. “To host a world cup race, you have to have world class terrain.
0 kommentar(er)
