Hello,

Massive storms, schedule overhauls, heroic riding: round six of the 2024 Downhill World Cup in Loudenvielle, France, last week was chaotic and brilliant in equal measures.

Real mud races are few and far between. In Loudenvielle, the rain began early in the week and kept falling until, by Friday’s first practice sessions, the track was a quagmire. That first day led into a hectic weekend of weather and schedule changes.

But by the end, finals produced some of the most exciting racing in a while, and the challenging conditions brought riders’ skills to the fore.

We’ve compiled some notes, photos by Boris and Sven, and links we think you’ll like below.

Hope you enjoy looking through.

Cheers,

James
+the Misspent Summers team

NEED: NO HERO DIRT WITHOUT RAIN PRINT

BIBLICAL: mud-stained notes from Loudenvielle, France, DH World Cup R6 2024

• Backstory: read our Loudenvielle pre-race notes here
• Official: watch the actual highlights in the Sleeper Shreddit here
• Beyond the official Line: watch Red Bull’s latest post-race show with Rob Warner and co here, including Loudenvielle analysis, Myriam Nicole interview, Specialized’s magic buttons, Olympics recap, and the state of the industry (at 22:10)
• Audio: listen to the excellent post-race show by Downtime Podcast here
• Elite men: 1. Benoît Coulanges 3:40.480, 2. Reece Wilson +2.231, 3. Andreas Kolb +2.743
• Elite women: 1. Myriam Nicole 4:05.440, 2. Valentina Höll +1.145, 3. Phoebe Gale +4.802
• Junior men: 1. Max Alran 3:31.707, 2. Tyler Waite +1.640, 3. Luke Wayman +4.391
• Junior women: 1. Erice van Leuven 4:09.898, 2. Heather Wilson +3.034, 3. Sacha Earnest +6.180
• Series standings: Bruni and Höll take the elite series titles with a race to spare (more on that below); Alran (M) and van Leuven lead the juniors
• Full results and standings: here (downloadable PDFs included)
• Vibe: riders love the Loudenvielle track. Nobody can stop the rains that came, but a bit more prep after last year’s carnage could’ve helped things along. The racing was amazing to watch
• Dream league: are you on the Race Companion?
• In deep: read George Gore Browne’s B-Zone Bullets for a brief event overview from the murky underworld of the b-zone here
• Disclaimer: don’t bother messaging Gore Browne to ask who’s signed the four-year deal. He won’t tell you
• Word: jurty
• Rug out: after torrential rain all night and morning, the track got messy during practice on Friday. Worried what might happen if everyone continued riding, the organisers held a vote and subsequently canned the afternoon practice session, meaning many elites would have only a handful of runs at best before Saturday’s qualifying session
• Opinion: the mud was good, but it was also bad. It just depends on who you ask and in what context
• Friday success: the algorithm had a field day with all the crash videos published almost in real-time by creators and rehashed by number-hungry content aggregators. Friday fails on an actual Friday with authentic fails – a modern media dream come true

Continued below…

• New schedule…: not only Friday practice was binned. Saturday’s schedule was rejigged to ‘allow for track maintenance and additional training for all riders’
• …rescheduled: then, on Saturday morning, another update came through, this time cancelling the penultimate-ever (we reckon) elite semi-finals due for that afternoon (without adding in any additional practice time) and delaying the start of practice from 9:00 to 10:30 am, allowing further course maintenance (a wood board was added across the finish line double)
• No punches pulled: Norco Factory Racing’s Performance Manager Alan Milway summarised the behind-the-scenes of the event, er, concisely in this post
• Semi-cancelled: with Saturday’s semi-final cancelled, elites raced a single qualifying round (with the normal qualifying points – see below) to determine 30 men and 10 women who would go into finals (plus any Protected riders who didn’t make the cut – but, semi-confusingly, only those who would normally be protected from semis into finals)
• Not a good point: there are 100 points available for winning a semi-final, and only 50 for winning qualifying. Cancelling a points-scoring run meant fewer available series points, fortifying the series leaders’ positions at the top
• Final point: with only ten spots (plus Protected riders) in elite women’s finals, qualifying (or semi-finalling) for those spaces is always a fraught affair. Camille Balanche crashed hard in her qualifying run here, leading to a red flag (course hold) and re-runs for nine riders whose runs were affected. Unusually, and perhaps under schedule pressure, the organisers put the re-runs two hours later, after elite men qualifying
• Said and done: as Warner Bros. Discovery noted in its official post-qualifying report, ‘those who were dropping in later in the [elite] men’s field could benefit from a quickly drying track’ – elite women re-runs were even later. There’s a reason re-runs normally happen during or directly after the rider’s category
• Positive negative: the above might sound a bit negs, but overall the Loudenvielle event was spot-on. Lovely place, amazing track, solid crowd. Still, we think it’s worth recording the not-so-perfect bits
• Second opinion: there’s nothing more exciting than watching someone slay a filthy, brilliant, mucky track. Give us mud tech over high speeds any day
• Just when they thought it was over: on race day (Sunday), the juniors had arguably the best conditions (mud-lover Reece Wilson would disagree) with a drying track, decent visibility and no rain. But, perhaps caught out by the added speed, the top junior men went down like bowling pins, crashing in spectacular fashion one after the other. Eight of the top fifteen exploded or rode off the track. Luke Wayman’s heavy slam in the last corner could have been a race-ender, except that, er, it literally was. Despite falling a couple of metres from the finish archway, Wayman somehow broke the timing beam, and his time held for third place in the results

More below…

• Where she belongs: Myriam Nicole has suffered some horrendous injuries in her time, including missing the entire 2023 season through a nightmare concussion. She just keeps coming back though. Finally, in Loudenvielle, she scored her first World Cup win since 2022. Bravo!
• Onto a winner: you might’ve noticed the small tube attached to the upper of Nicole’s forks. Some say it’s a mass damper (the hottest new tech in downhill), but we’ve heard it’s actually a cigar case
• Hero mode: the worst of the weather hit the elite men’s finals. Some had zero visibility and rain; others had a drying, slippery course. Everyone got heaps of mud. Reece Wilson and Benoît Coulanges were inspiring to watch as they braved it across impossible off-cambers and rallied down the course with total confidence despite the messy carnage. They were rewarded for their skills: Wilson back on the podium in second (his first podium since 2021 and a comeback after a spate of awful injuries), and Coulanges on top and victorious (his second-ever World Cup win at home in front of a French crowd). Dreamy
• Racking them up: with his qualifying win and fourth in finals, Loic Bruni scored enough points to secure the series title with a round still to go (his nearest title rival, Amaury Pierron, crashed out). Bruni now has four elite DH World Cup titles (one more and he’ll equal Nicolas Vouilloz and Aaron Gwin), ten World Cup race wins and six DH World Championships titles (five as an elite and one as a junior)
• Tangent: there was no standalone junior category at World Cups until 2013. Before that, juniors raced head-to-head with the grownups in the elite category. Bruni was junior in 2011 and 2012 so raced with the big kids as an elite. Regardless of the age deficit, he scored his first elite podium in 2012 in Windham, USA while still a teenager
• Frenchwash: the only non-French rider to win an elite men’s World Cup or World Champs race in 2024 is Ireland’s Rónán Dunne (round two, Poland)
• Numbers game: Vali Höll again wrapped up the overall title with a race to spare, just like she did in 2023. In five seasons as an elite, Höll has so far scored ten World Cup race wins and two overall titles, plus three World Championships wins. As a junior, she won 13 World Cup races, two overall titles and two World Championships
• Pressure situation: World Champion one week, World Cup champion the following week. Höll must’ve been on a high after winning Worlds in Pal Arinsal, Andorra, then the series title in Loudenvielle. But can you imagine the focus and energy it takes to ride at that level with so much pressure, expectation and stress? Champions are wired differently
• Leaky electrics: during the last few elite men’s finals race runs, the rain got the better of the audio and then the visuals in the finish area. Luckily a few people in the crowd were logged in to their streaming subscriptions
• Word play: it was good to see a classic Kona Stinky on track under social media influencer David Martins. Tangent, but whatever you do, don’t look up what Kona means in Portuguese
• Lapping it up: who got the most off-season runs in Loudenvielle when the lift was open to bikes last winter?
• Conquered: bike company Commencal is no stranger to podiums, but Loudenvielle marked a first for the brand: every category (junior and elite men and women) won on a Commencal Supreme bike. Max Commencal, the company founder, also started Sunn bikes in the 1980s; that company first won a DH World Championships in 1993 (under Anne-Caroline Chausson as a junior – the following year another Sunn rider, François Gachet, won the elite men’s title)
• Observation: do all Commencal team riders have the same riding style now?
• Crystal balling: cash-access
• Status quo restored: it’s not just Nicole who’s back on form. Reece Wilson, Tahnée Seagrave and Amaury Pierron have suffered big, almost career-ending injuries in the last couple of seasons but are now all back right at the sharp end of racing
• New old: more standard venue visits
• Bad timing: talking of Seagrave, she really got the worst luck (possibly ever) in her finals run, with heavy rain starting just in time for her to drop in. As she’d qualified fastest, she was the last rider down the hill – and the only elite woman to get properly rained on. The track turned into an ice rink immediately; Seagrave unsurprisingly crashed out, although commendably she did get the fastest first split time. Seagrave’s hungry for a win and there’s one race to go
• Loud-tech: disc covers, brake pad covers, uncut spikes
• Master guidance: Aaron Gwin, one of the winningest-ever downhill racers, gave some wise words about mud riding while in the commentary box: stay in the rut, follow the water. Unfortunately, as he noted, he failed to follow his own advice and crashed out in his race run. Still, great to see Gwin back racing World Cups for the first time after his horrendous Lenzerheide 2023 injury
• Certified muck: a few favourite mud races: Loudenvielle 2024 (obvs!), Les Gets 2024, Leogang 2020, Champéry 2007, Kaprun 2003, Les Gets 1999, Arai 1998. Watch them in this World Cup mudfest videos post
• You’ll like this: surely this is a good moment to remind you about our ‘There is no hero dirt without rain’ print? Add a positive message to your wall here