Mountain Bike World Championships 2022 [FULL RACE – XCC] (ladies)

August 26, 2022

Mountain Bike World Championships 2022 – XCC WE – Les Gets

The Mountain Bike World Championships come around once a season and are the most coveted and hard fought race of the year. To be victorious means wearing the biggest prize in cycling – the Rainbow Jersey. Win it and you become a legend and go down in cycling history for eternity. This year’s World Championships take place in Les Gets, an Alpine ski resort that’s played host to countless top-tier mountain bike competitions over the past thirty years. The French commune has even hosted the Mountain Bike World Championships once already in 2004. Riders from all over the globe will have been competing all year in national races and – for many – on the UCI World Cup circuit, accumulating UCI points to compete for the overall World Cup title.
Similar to a criterium in road racing, short track mountain bike racing was introduced as an exciting, spectator-friendly event. Exciting to watch, the first race was held in the 2018 World Championship. The discipline is now a feature of World Cup events and National Championships. It is raced over seven laps of a 1.2km-long course which for what it lacks in technical difficulty for the riders, it makes up for in leg-sapping short climbs and a relentless pace. It’s an intense race format with riders spending most of the 20-40 minutes deep in the dreaded red zone.

Day 3 of competition at the 2022 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships concluded on Friday evening in Les Gets, France, with the crowd-pleasing XCC. French fans had even more reason to be pleased, with their own Pauline Ferrand-Prévot winning the women’s world title.

Only in its second year as a rainbow jersey event, the Short Track runs for 20 minutes of extreme effort on a cross country circuit. The Les Gets circuit featured off-camber switchback climbs and multiple rock gardens to test the riders.

The women’s race quickly came down to a core group of nine riders, with no one willing to attack too early. Rain began falling halfway through the race, making the grass corners and the rocks slippery.

Ferrand Prévot sat consistently in the top-4 but out of the lead, until the seventh lap (of nine), when she attacked aggressively, opening a gap of 15 seconds on the chasers. Greta Seiwald (Italy) and Annie Last (Great Britain) led the early chase but faded, and no one else could close the gap, as Ferrand-Prévot cruised into victory. Alessandra Keller (Switzerland) took silver, 18 seconds back, with Gwendalyn Gibson (USA) finishing third at 21 second back.

“It’s crazy, you know, I can’t believe it,” said Ferrand-Prévot about winning before a home crowd. “I saw that [the course] was not super fast, so I just wanted to stay on wheels. I had to wait, wait, but with three laps to go I made an attack and went full gas. I was able to make a gap and I tried to keep a good pace but be smooth on the rock gardens. I was feeling good in the last few days, so now it is one more gold medal in the pocket. I’m really happy.”

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