Val di Sole is a mighty venue to close out the 2022 UCI Downhill World Cup season and there’s still an overall title up for grabs.
With no qualifying points for the final round of the 2022 UCI Downhill World Cup, making the cut means you can go hell for leather in your finals run with 250 points on offer for the Elites and 60 for the Juniors.
Here’s the sums and variations on overall title possibilities.
Junior Women
Norco Factory Racing’s Gracey Hemstreet has all but wrapped the Junior Women’s title having not finished outside the top three all year. She sits 25 points ahead of Canyon Collective FMD’s Phoebe Gale, the only other rider who can spoil the party. Your recently-crowned Junior World Champion Jenna Hastings will have to battle Izabela Yankova to hold onto third but can’t catch the two front runners.
It should be business as usual for Hemstreet as Gale needs a win combined with an lower than 4th place finish for her to take the title. An outside chance is that if Hemstreet were to finish 5th and Gale won, they’d be tied on points. It would then go down to who’s won the most recent race, as they’d be tied on World Cup wins too. In that instance, Gale would take it.
Our money is on Hemstreet.
Junior Men
Val di Sole will be Santa Cruz Syndicate’s Jackson Goldstone victory lap as he wrapped the title up in Mont Saint Anne. We don’t expect him to be going for anything but the win following his crash in Les Gets.
Will we see the Canadian posting the fastest time of the day? We’d be willing to put money on it.
Jordan Williams will likely settle for second as Rainbow Stripes are forever baby. Lachlan Stevens-McNab won’t bother Williams’ second place after wrecking himself at Worlds.
Elite Women
By far the most exciting prospect going into World Cup finals is the Elite Women’s field. The current top three, Camille Balanche, Vali Hoell and Myriam Nicole can all win the overall this weekend.
Balanche simply needs to finish better than fifth, and the title is hers. This would be a true champion’s win seeing as she came back to a top 10 finish in Les Gets just a fortnight after a collarbone break. It’s unlikely that her rivals are going to sit back and let her take the overall. They’ll both be gunning for it.
Hoell needs a win here and Balanche to finish worse than 4th to take what would be an unexpected double title win. If Hoell finishes in the silver medal position, Balanche needs 8th or better to take the title.
Myriam needs to win and both Balanche and Hoell to have absolute disasters to improve her current standing of third. If Hoell finishes 9th or worse then Nicole will take second.
Our prediction is Hoffman for the win.
Elite Men
Commencal Muc-Off’s Amaury Pierron is 249 points ahead of Finn Iles in the overall. All he needs to do as a protected rider is break the beam in qualifying then finish his finals run.
If Finn wins and Amaury fails to finish his finals run then the Canadian will take the overall by a single point.
We’d quite like to see Benoit Coulanges take the win please.
