NPS Final - Fort William

The final round of the NPS took us up the long road to Fort William. After a week of daily rain, we had a fantastic day of riding on Saturday, so warm and pleasant you would barely believe it was September.



The track has roughed up considerably since the World Cup in May, with many more rocks and brake bumps showing. The wear the track has suffered this summer meant that the Nevis Range people didn't want the wood sections used, so the track went round the fire road way instead. Apart from that it was the same version of the track as at the World Cup, but much faster after a summer of drying out and hardening up.

Seeding on Saturday afternoon had me crashing a couple of times to qualify 4th overall. I felt pretty good about the riding inbetween times and hoped to improve my time the next day.

Sunday morning practice was nice and dry but shortly after the heavens opened and stayed open. Many people did their race runs in the rain, through a thick blanket of fog as cloud after cloud rolled its way across the face of the hill. Fortunately for Elite men and women it momentarily cleared up.

I set off fairly well but taking a smooth line and then thinking "oh now that's the wrong line for that berm, I might crash", meant that I did indeed crash! Doh! Anyway, I got third, which was good, and ended up 3rd overall in the National Points Series, so not too bad at all.

UCI World Cup - Schladming, Austria

This wasn't my most successful race ever, but it was good fun. The track is pretty steep and technical with loads of berms, root sections, and bits that look like other bits. You can go super fast and have some real good fun on your bike. It cuts up pretty bad though, and there were some really big braking bumps, bigger than anything you'd ever see at Fort William.

The weather was awesome too, after a thunderstorm on Thursday morning, it was blazing sunlight the rest of the weekend. Every morning the track was a little slippy because of the dew but it made it even more fun, getting two wheel slides going and seeing how far you could push it.

It was suprising how many riders there were in the men's category, and definately many who should not have been riding a world cup. It was quite difficult to get a decent practice run in at times.

I was pretty nervous on race day and in qualifiers had a really stupid crash which bent my bars round. It took ages to straighten them out but since it was automatic qualification (there were less than 30 women) I didn't really worry too much and qualifed 3rd from last.

Race run started off ok, until I nobraked it into a corner and slid out... then carried on and went into the tapes... then carried on and got all the rooty bits nailed and randomly fell off in a pile of dust at the bottom of the wooded section. Doh!

It was cool to see some awesome results from the Brits though, Tracy Moseley was 3rd, Gaskell 4th and Rach Atherton 5th and Brendan Fairclough was 5th in the mens too. Tracy won the overall and so did Peaty. Well done everyone!