The mud has settled after qualifying the Leogang Downhill World Cup and four riders have taken the first scalp of the season.
We’re back racing folks! Leogang is proving a tricky lion to tame with the addition of dollops of rain with the woods not drying out much even when the rain held off.
Junior Women
With only one rider posting a time in yesterday’s Timed Training, we can’t read anything into what happened there. Austrian Sophie Gutohrle would make it count on the lower slopes, seeing off a charging Izabela Yankova and Sophie Riva to take the win by 7.455 seconds.
Junior Men
American Christopher Grice would slash a good six seconds off his Time Training time from yesterday to take the fastest time in Junior Men on both days. He’d hold off Jackson Goldstone who sat out Timed Training with Nuno Reis staying in the top three both days and hacking a full 25 seconds off his Time Training time in the process.
Your 2020 World Cup and World Champion Oisin O’Callaghan would be off the pace in 13th but could come back strong for finals.
Fourth to sixth place are all on the same second, with fourth to tenth only five seconds apart. A minor slip or a pinned section could see you rise or fall plenty of places tomorrow.
Elite Women
Cometh the hour, cometh the Vali. Despite a broken leg here last year on home turf and being a first year Elite, Vali Höll went fastest in every sector bar the penultimate, to put 2.234 seconds into Myriam Nicole. Both riders would be comfortably ahead of the rest of the competition with third place Marine Cabirou five seconds adrift of Pompon.
Elite Men
We can’t say we were expecting that… With 2020 being the Minnaar/Bruni/Wilson show in Elite Men, Troy Brosnan might not have been on everyone’s radar coming into this race. His social media indicated he was loving the mud and praying for more rain, and that clearly wasn’t just mind games. A full 6.734 up on second place.
Danny Hart shows he’s on pace on his new team with a second place, and Thibaut Daprela would have likely been closer to Brosnan after laying down a screamer of a run before taking some soil samples in the lower sectors.
Second to tenth place are separated by three seconds, so things are as tight as ever at the sharp end. In fact, second to twentieth is a five second gap. Brosnan has the quali scalp and the points, but the rest of the field is anyone’s guess.
We’d hasten to add that qualifying hasn’t yet finished, but we’d be (happily) surprised if Brosnan’s time was beaten.
