While his team mates were in Northumberland or Ireland racing enduro and downhill, Christo Gallagher was bagging a Red Bull Pumptrack Worlds Podium in Italy.
Photos by Sottobosco.
Our man of many talents, Christo Gallagher left his Nukeproof Mega at home and got himself to Italy for the qualifying round of the Red Bull Pumptrack World Championship.
The Italian qualifier event for the Red Bull Pumptrack World Championship was held in Siror in the Dolomites, about an hour and a half from Venice(ish). I decided since I couldn’t make the Glasgow event I might as well fly to one I can easily get to in Europe. Ryanair proved to have a nice cheap flight to Venice-Treviso and flying with a jump bike is a breeze, so I just booked it and a hire car and packed my tent and off to Italy I was to go.
The forecast leading up to the event was looking pretty bleak. Heavy thunderstorms were forecast for the whole day and I was slightly hoping they’d postpone the event to the following day when blue skies were forecast.
I arrived in Venice-Treviso about 10pm, picked up my hire car and headed to the small town of Siror. Having sketchily researched a quiet looking spot on Google maps for my tent, I set up for the night in a corner of a car park and tried to sleep through the loud storm.
Saturday morning came round and I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of rain. It even looked like the sun might come out, however there was some ominous clouds covering the mountain tops.
I headed to practice, which I was a bit nervous of because if I am be completely honest, I wasn’t wild about having to ride the pumptrack in the wet because it’s hard to trust wet tarmac for grip.
Fortunately the track was drying and I set to work figuring out the track. I quickly began to realise though that racing EWS and being on the road for 8 weeks, maybe wasn’t the best prep for this race and whilst I could get up to speed, I wasn’t sure how long it would be until the muscle set in.
Qualifiers came around about 3pm and everyone got two runs with the best one counting as your qualifier position. In the women’s race there was only four entrants, so all would qualify and in the mens there was around 50 entrants, but only the top 32 will qualify for the knock out rounds.
The womens fastest qualifer was Vanessa Kagar from Austria, who also went on to put on a strong performance and win the race ahead of Camilla Tagliapietra.
It wasn’t until qualifiers came around that I realised you were allowed to pedal off the start and not just push with your foot, it was at this point I realised my gearing might be a bit hard to get a good start. However, I still felt good about qualifying and was excited to see how I stacked up as there was a few fast looking folk that had showed up.
In the first qualifier heat I managed to qualify first, but could see my start was not helping me, enduro legs and a hard gear don’t make for a fast start, so I was concerned it might not hold. I was right and a participant before me managed to beat my run one time. For my second qualifier run, I was determined to qualify first, so I just gave it the beans and managed to edge ahead and hold onto first place qualifier for the finals.
I was stoked to qualify first. I knew at that point that whatever happened in the finals I was content that I’d proved to myself that I’m decent at pumptrack because until this point I didn’t really know.
Finals started off well, managing to post some even faster laps of the track, but I knew I was getting tired and my starts were not getting any better. In the semi-finals first round, I unfortunately completely messed up the start and lost too much time to make up in the second round and didn’t make it to the final. By this point though, my arms were completely toast and I knew even if I’d made it to the finals there was no way I could ride properly.
The small finals didn’t go any better, with some heavy rain I didn’t see any point in risking a crash when either way I’d qualified for the world championship finals, so I just did a couple of laps and boosted the jumps instead, which was a fun way to end the event.
The finals results ended up being super close with less than 0.1 seconds separating the two, but in the end Giacomo Fontani from Italy took the win over Eric Seifried from Austria. The final two mens qualifiers were Simon Rus from Slovakia in 3rd and myself in 4th.
All in all, the team from Primiero Bike put on a great event and drew in a large crowd for most of the event. Unfortunately the heavy rain put a few people off, but given the chance I’d love to return to another race on this track.
