Friday, February 27, 2009

Pre-view of round 2 of Cyprus Sunshine Cup

The 2nd round of the Cyprus Sunshine Cup is a stage race, consisting of 3 stages on 3 consecutive days:
  • First stage is a Time trial of the 7.4 km long XC loop
  • Second stage is an XC point-to-point race of 41km for men and 32km for women elite
  • Third stage is a normal (lapped) XC race on the 7,4km XC course, women elite was start loop+4 laps, men elite was start loop +5 laps.

The week before the races Ryan and I went to pre-ride the XC course and part of the point to point course (the 7km single track descent). The XC course was basically mostly easy uphill fire road connected by super steep single track descents or single track climbs and descents. I crashed on one of them and thought I may have to walk some of them in the race. For the point-to-point race, we only knew that it was fire-road in the beginning, then a huge long single track climb with 700m vertical climb, about 1km tarmac on top and then a super long singletrack descent, about 7km long and 600m down. We didn't have the time to pre-ride the whole point-to-point loop, so we decided to at least ride the descent which you could reach from the road. So we cycled up the 11km up the tarmac and did the descent. First I found it quite technical and scary, a lot of tight switchbacks - it was kind of a cross between benchcut and GC in Djouce, along the ridge of the mountains with fantastic views.

The day before the race we did another pre-ride of the XC course and Ryan gave me an uplift to the descent, and it was a lot less scary the 2nd time round, only the weather was getting a lot worse, rain and wind and hail and lightning. We took a few videos from the uplift (sorry, no bike action in these)...



Another video of us driving up the hill:



And we are still driving up the hill....



Just before I have to go:

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