The UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Championships forged a highlight on Snowshoe, West Virginia this weekend, making it the primary time the endurance occasion has been held in North America in its 22-year historical past. Competitions happen on Saturday, September 21.
Defending MTB Marathon girls’s world champion Mona Mitterwallner (Austria) will match up in opposition to the 2 different riders on final yr’s podium, Candice Lill (South Africa) and Adelheid Morath (Germany). Among the many 51 girls on the beginning record she’ll additionally need to battle 2016 MTB Marathon world champion Jolanda Neff (Switzerland), who’s on a comeback from lacking three months of competitors as a consequence of an ongoing sickness.
From the lads’s 88-rider begin record, a brand new champion shall be topped as two-time winner Henrique Avancini (Brazil) retired within the rainbow bands. Seeking to take the jersey are 2023 podium finishers Martin Stošek (Czechia) and Lukas Baum (Germany) in addition to 2021 world champion Andreas Seewald (Germany) and two-time world champion Héctor Páez León (Colombia).
A sturdy roster for the house staff contains reigning US Marathon champions Alexis Skarda and Carson Beckett, in addition to girls’s runner-up and Marathon World Cup winner Hannah Otto and males’s runner-up Bradyn Lange.
Neff, the cross-country mountain bike Olympic champion from the Tokyo Video games, seems for her sixth MTB world title. She certified for her third Olympic Video games in Paris, however handed on the chance to deal with respiration remedy in her restoration from ongoing well being points.
After taking off a number of months of racing, she returned to motion in Andorra for the MTB World Championships, ending thirty fifth within the XCO, however moved into type at a pair of Swiss XCO races, using to fourth place each occasions behind high compatriot Sina Frei, who shall be on the beginning line in West Virginia.
With twin citizenship in Argentina and the USA, Sofia Gomez Villafañe will participate within the championships for Argentina, contemporary off her victory at Chequamegon MTB Competition. The win final weekend in Wisconsin gave her a agency lead within the total standings of the Life Time Grand Prix, with two races to go. Earlier this yr, Villafañe mentioned she needed to benefit from MTB Marathon Worlds right here within the US, so made it a part of her calendar.
Together with Villafañe, Skarda and Otto are amongst a lot of Life Time Grand Prix girls’s rivals within the discipline, which additionally contains Peta Mullens (Australia), Haley Smith (Canada) and Samara Sheppard (Australia).
A few of the high males’s contenders who’re additionally competing within the Grand Prix embody Lange, Matthew Beers (South Africa), Zach Calton (USA), Brendan Johnston (Australia), Cole Paton (USA), and Alex Wild (USA).
Snowshoe Mountain has hosted a number of rounds of mountain bike World Cups prior to now, however it’s a first for a world championship. The course is available in at 104km with 1,988 metres of elevation acquire, with 8.5km of pavement and nearly all of course on a mixture of grime singletrack and doubletrack. Nonetheless, organisers have famous that 24% of the course is “unknown”, which can be washed-out fireplace roads.
The UCI MTB Marathon World Cup season finale at Snowshoe final yr, Otto soloed to victory forward of Canadian Smith and Lithuania’s Katazina Sosna. The lads’s race resulted in a muddy three-up dash, received by Germany’s Simon Stiebjahn.
