Mona Mitterwallner (Austria) and Simon Andreassen (Denmark) received the rainbow jerseys on the UCI Mountain Bike Marathon World Championships (XCM) on Sunday at Snowshoe Mountain in West Virginia. It was the primary time the MTB Marathon occasion had been held in North America within the 22-year historical past of the championships.
For a 3rd time in 4 years, Mitterwallner secured the rainbow jersey within the elite ladies’s marathon race, with the 22 12 months previous ending the 104km course in 5:15:06.
Sina Frei (Switzerland) completed 26 seconds behind to assert the silver medal whereas Candice Lill (South Africa), the silver medallist final 12 months, rode over the road solo one other 43 seconds later to take bronze. The 2016 XCM title holder, Jolanda Neff (Switzerland) completed one spot off the rostrum in fourth.
Two-time junior MTB world champion Laura Stigger (Austria) was fifth and Sofia Gomez Villafañe (Argentina), the ladies’s chief within the Life Time Grand Prix collection, got here sixth. The highest rider for the USA was Alexis Skarda in ninth place.
A two-time junior cross-country MTB world champion and the elite males’s Marathon bronze medallist at Worlds in 2022, the 26-year-old Andreassen completed in entrance to take his first elite world title with a time of 4:33:08.
Andreassen had labored his approach as much as the entrance group and attacked to victory after beginning within the again row, together with Coloradoan Christopher Blevins, the reigning Pan-American cross-country mountain bike champion.,
Blevins completed shut behind to take second, 10 seconds again from Andreassen.
“A wild day beginning behind the sector and straight down the mountain onto singletrack,” stated Blevins on Instagram. “4:30 hours was loads of time to work my approach up, however was nonetheless stunned once I realized I had made it to the entrance group.”
David Valero Serrano (Spain) came visiting the road simply two seconds again from Blevins to take third.
2021 XCM world champion Andreas Seewald (Germany) completed fourth and 2024 MTB brief monitor world champion Victor Koretzky (France) in fifth. USA’s Cole Paton was ninth.
