BUSA MTB championships, March 03


Results can be found here

Just a few scribbles about the BUSA champs this weekend.

This year we put forward a team of 8 for the BUSA mountain bike championship including 2 downhillers, which is 2 more than last year! By various ways and means we all arrived somewhere between friday night and saturday night at Hopton Castle in Shropshire which is an area of forest on a largish hill specifically dedicated to MTBing. As such, both national downhill and XC races have held there which made it an obvious candidate for BUSA.

Our 2 resident downhillers, Sam Birch and Will Weightman put in a stirling effort representing us on a twisty, rooty downhill course which looked so much more pleasant than the one at last year's BUSA champs in Hamsterly. Long, fast and dry it has in the past seen the likes of Steve Peat and Rob Warner fly down it. I think all went well, although I haven't got the full results yet.

Sam joined Dan Holland and Howard Lam the next day in the sport section of the cross country race. The cross country course had been described in slightly different turns of phrase by different people, but from our perspective it was great. Consisting of, on aggregate, 2 long climbs on fireroad with a bith of singletrack thrown in for good measure and 2 fast and at times technical singletrack descents, the total length was just over 5 miles per lap. The sport race was started in a slightly different way to usual - the famous speach that the nutter black guy in Pulp Fiction used to come out with before he shot people had been slightly and subtley altered and the race was to start on the first gunshot! Nice! The sport race did two laps of the course with the winning time in 58m00. Dan pulled in a very respectable 20th in about 1hr10 (more accurate times when published) with Howard coming in at 58th and Sam at 60th.

The championship section of the XC consisted of Jon Ellis, myself,Ash Bown and Steve Block. We had 4 laps to do and the race length was expected to be of the order of about 2 hours. Our start was the more conventional whistle start and the atmosphere was a little more tense than in the sport race! Things went off quite well apart from the crash at the start line that happened somewhere behind me (NOT my fault!) and the usual bottleneck at the first tricky climb. The climbing soon spread the field and we were able to make ground and settle into a rhythm that would hopefully carry us through the race. To cut a long story short, there were (I think) about 67 starters and only 35odd finishers. I'm afraid I haven't got full results but the ones I do know:

Me : 14th Jon : 17th Ash : 25ish Steve : 25-30ish

I think good fun was had by all, at least in retrospect! Thanks to:

Jon : for driving and for the 90s dance tapes Steve : for carrying back everything that Jon couldn't afterwards

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