World Cup Mt. Sainte Anne

Uh, that was a bad race! Just one of those races you need to put behind you

We have now moved on to Windham, USA and so I had a few days of recovering after the World Cup race in Canada. It just wasn’t my race. Somehow I just felt numb, in my head and in my body. I can’t come up with a reason. I guess it was a mixture of humidity, heat, jetlag and nerves. In the days leading up to the race I had both good and bad feelings in training. I had good lines on the course and had a strategy for the race.

Looking back on the race now, I should have been much more aggressive from the start. In the past I went over my limit at the start of the race at this place and had to pay for it, therefore I was careful not to blow up this time. That was a bad tactic. Further down the field, you get involved in a lot of traffic and crashes and don’t have space to ride smoothly. Especially on a technical course like this. I underestimated the chaos, that goes on down the field and let myself get too influenced by everything happening around me. And there were a lot of crashes. Eventually I ended up crashing myself too and unfortunately broke my saddle, my shoe and wounded my knee badly. I was a complete mess at this point, but somehow still made it down to the techzone. I barely knew what was up and down and decided to abandon the race. For sure, I’m not happy about that, but a race like this, is what fills you with indescribable joy and happiness, when you cross the finishline on days where you are absolutely flying.

The week here in Windham has been awesome so far. We drove by car from Mt. Sainte Anne to here, which was a nice roadtrip. Crossing the border between Canada and USA was quite an experience and luckily the Americans didn’t hold back on giving us on the “grand borde/customs tour.” Apparently canadian rental cars containing around 15 people with almost 15 different nationalities is too suspicious to just let through (at these two World Cups both the cross country and the Downhill division of our team is present, so, a big international group). Nevertheless we made it here.

I’m excited to race here. This course always suited me well and today we went out for a course check. A few sections are new and a few sections has been taken out, but in the big picture it’s still very much the same. As always the race will be broadcasted live on sunday at Redbull.tv, so do tune in