Mountain Bike World Championships 2022 [FULL RACE – XCC]

August 26, 2022

Mountain Bike World Championships 2022 – XCC – 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. Sam Gaze of New Zealand took the men’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 rain had stopped by the time the men started, however, it left the rock surfaces extremely slippery, with multiple crashes happening through the race.

A large group of 15 formed at the front, with surges fracturing it before the leaders backed off and the group came back together.

This held until Lap 6, when Henrique Avancini (Brazil) crashed in the second last rock garden of the lap while in the lead. Multiple riders crashed into him or were forced to stop and run, splitting the lead group and forcing them to chase.

On the final lap, Gaze attacked with defending champion Chris Blevins (USA) the only one to stay with him.

Coming into that same rock garden that Avancini crashed in, Blevins went down, leaving Gaze free to cruise to the line. Swiss riders Filippo Colombo and Thomas Litscher took the remaining podium spots, finishing 3 seconds and 7 seconds behind Gaze respectively.

“The rain that came down before the race made it very slippery,” commented Gaze, “and made it hard to keep position. Guys were crashing in front of me so I pulled it back for the first half. I knew it would come down to the last climb. Chris [Blevins] was super strong today, but he had a bit of a mishap on that last corner. Super happy, super proud … this is a dream come true.”

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