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 12 months’s podium, Candice Lill (South Africa) and Adelheid Morath (Germany). Among the many 51 girls on the beginning checklist she’ll additionally must 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 boys’s 88-rider begin checklist, a brand new champion might 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 group consists of 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 give attention to respiratory 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, driving to fourth place each instances behind high compatriot Sina Frei, who might 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 Pageant. The win final weekend in Wisconsin gave her a agency lead within the general standings of the Life Time Grand Prix, with two races to go. Earlier this 12 months, Villafañe mentioned she wished to reap the benefits of 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 opponents within the discipline, which additionally consists of Peta Mullens (Australia), Haley Smith (Canada) and Samara Sheppard (Australia).
A number 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 achieve, with 8.5km of pavement and the vast majority of course on a mixture of grime singletrack and doubletrack. Nevertheless, 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 12 months, Otto soloed to victory forward of Canadian Smith and Lithuania’s Katazina Sosna. The boys’s race led to a muddy three-up dash, received by Germany’s Simon Stiebjahn.
