Sprint Gold from AJ

Monday, 12 July 2010

My last urban MTBO WOC sprint was in Poland 2 years ago, where although I finished 6^th it was a race where I never felt comfortable with the map and was quite disappointed with afterwards.  So despite having surprised everyone, not the least myself by winning the sprint (my least favourite discipline) last year in Israel, I was once again nervous with the prospect of the very urban terrain facing us in Chaves.  This was compounded by the fact that the town was going to be relatively open, with public and spectators wandering and driving through, so an element of luck was going to be involved to avoid having an accident!  In the end there were no real problems, with dozens of marshals all around the city controlling traffic as much as possible and warning if 2 riders were about to arrive at the same corner at the same time!

I started in the Red start group (last 10 competitors) by virtue of being the reigning champ, despite not currently being in the top 10 ranked riders.  After waiting around for a couple of hours in the arena and warming up on the very dusty running track (we all got much dirtier from the warm up than the race itself!) it was time to hit the streets of Chaves.  Straight away on the first control the 1:7500 scale got the better of me and I went straight past the gap in the buildings I needed to take, and despite not going too far past it was enough to lose 20 odd seconds.  Another couple of hesitant controls later I saw Lasse Brun Pederssen who had started 1 min behind me on an in-and-out control, and he was probably now only within 30 sec.  This spurred me on, and for the rest of the course I had no more wobbles, and maybe only lost a handful of seconds in route choice.  Once I had the flow going I finally felt able to hit full speed now and then and my super fast Schwalbe Furious Freds definitely were definitely not slowing me down!

After crossing the line I had the fastest time, but given my early mistake I was sure that Lasse or one of the other fast four riders who had started behind me would appear any second.  After a few minutes had gone by and all the other riders had crossed the line it was finally time to celebrate my second sprint gold in a row.  There are no corny medal-in-teeth pictures yet as the prize giving is tonight, but below you can see a couple of pics of the pretty bouquet I received at the flower ceremony!