Day 64: Timed Training at the Worlds

2 Sep 2011

By David Scorer

The fastest man down the hill today - Aaron Gwin

Day 64: The World Champs DH gets underway. We doubled-up today, and finally reached the 19th bike park of the URT. The host venue for the 2011 UCI World Championships: Champéry in Switzerland. But as far as defining it as a ‘bike park’ goes it’s not quite that simple – more in a second. First up we got a couple of quick runs in at Châtel before heading over to catch the timed training runs of the DH event in the afternoon. Herein lies the beauty of Châtel as you are perfectly placed in the Portes du Soleil region to investigate Morzine/Les Gets in one direction, and Champéry in the other, either in the car or (far more fun) on the bike using the trails and lifts.

Tim coming into the woods on the Fluid trail

So the reason that it’s not so simple to define Champéry as a bike park is because it’s not just Champéry! The trails here come under the umbrella of ‘Bikepark.ch’, and this is one of the 3 main parks in the Portes du Soleil, the others being Châtel, and Les Gets/Morzine. Each of these 3 have individual dedicated ‘bike park’ trail maps printed and available at tourist offices and lift stations. But Bikepark.ch actually consists of trails in and around Champéry, Morgins, Champoussin and Les Crosets. These could all be considered as different entities, or bike parks, as they are in distinctly different geographical locations – Morgins is actually in France! But they are still quite close to each other and whatever your opinion they all come under ‘Bikepark.ch’. As for the trails, there are numerous XC and Enduro trails in and out of each of these ‘hubs’, so you can get between each using trails and lifts. In addition there are 3 DH trails at Morgins (blue, red and black), 2 black DH trails and a 4X at Les Crosets, and of course the ‘Coupe du Monde’ DH at Champéry, scene of today’s action. Having not seen the other trails we can only comment on the Champéry DH, and you probably already know that this thing is STEEP. It was dry today which made it fast, but the forecast for race day on Sunday is heavy rain, which will make for a re-run of the muddy chaos of the World Cup in 2010. Cross that bridge when we come to it though, in the mean time here are a few pics in the sun today…

It's a series of huge hits out the start gate - this is the biggest

This gives you some idea of how steep this course is!

Comments