After walking the track on Thursday afternoon, I was pretty excited to ride. The track had loads of corners, some fast traversing sections, one or two sick jumps up top, some rooty sections and a very tech line where you could hop over a stream.
Fridays practice runs didn't quite go according to plan. About half way down our first run on the track, I was riding behind Adi Van der Merwe, when we both over jumped one jump to flat - coming from SA both of us were used to having to hit jumps as fast as possible haha. The jump was on a bench cut section, which traversed the mountain. Adi ended up hitting the bank on our right and crashed afterwards, and I then hit him and went over the bars to the left, and down the mountain. Luckily neither of us were hurt and we went up for some other runs. Being Europe, it had to rain during the weekend, and Saturdays practice was a wet one. After a couple of runs, and some sketchy moments in the roots, it was time for seeding.
The track dried up remarkably quickly, and so we didn't actually need the mud tyres that were on our bikes. I seeded 35th.
The weather on race day seemed to stay pretty good and the track had some grip. I did 2 or 3 runs and just got my lines dialled and then went back to out apartment, and waited for race runs to start. My race run seemed to go a lot better than seeding and I felt better on track, than the day before. I somehow managed to smash the bash ring on my chain device while hopping over the stream in my run, so I am glad that it didn't affect the rest of my run. I ended up 37th with a time of 4:53.67. I had hoped to do better, but I had such a fun weekend. At least we got to hit some jumps on track, I was starting to miss those. Val di Sole World Cup up next.
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