Hello,

Golden leaves, loam and hero dirt; greasy rocks, fog and hero mode.

Mont-Sainte-Anne (MSA) DH World Cup capped off an epic 2024 season with changing conditions and just about everything that makes downhill such a brilliant sport to follow: fierce racing on a ferocious track lined with thousands of roaring fans. And the last person down the hill won.

It was a remarkable week in Canada.

Below, we’ve compiled some notes from MSA, with photos by Boris and Sven.

Hope you enjoy scrolling through.

Cheers,

James
+the Misspent Summers team

PRODUCT: SUPER SUPPORTER BUNDLE

HERO MODE: bravery and high speeds at the Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada, DH World Cup 2024

• Preview: read our pre-notes here
• Review: read our B-Zone Bullets by George Gore Browne here
• Recommended viewing here
• Get involved: if you like our work, please consider our Super Supporter Bundle
• Custom Focus: did you win the Race Companion fantasy league? Check out the standings here. Someone’s getting a nice new bike
• Big leagues: more to the point, BB and TJ drew even in R7 of the Back Alley Media Betting (BAMB) World Cup but SM lost 40 big ones
• Word: Chainsaw
• Quick rundown: riders diced with slippery death, sliding around from start to finish – several crashed in the first turn. Erice van Leuven won the junior women’s race despite crashing; Sacha Earnest finished second and Kale Cushman third. The Alran brothers dominated junior men, taking first (Max) and second (Till); Tyler Waite finished third. Conditions were already treacherous for the elite women, and there were numerous mishaps. Cabirou kept it fast and upright to take her second World Cup win of the year, with Gracey Hemstreet finishing second and Vali Höll third. Phoebe Gale and Mille Johnset rounded off the elite podium in fourth and fifth, respectively. Elite men had a fairytale storyline, with Brosnan returning from paternity leave (he missed round six and World Champs) to take his fourth-ever World Cup win as last rider down the hill, pipping Lachlan Stevens-McNab to the win by just six hundredths of a second. Laurie Greenland, who’s suffered with illness for a while now, made his comeback to the podium in third, with Rémi Thirion fourth and Benoît Coulanges fifth
• Double clutch: have you got ‘zero drag’ hub internals yet? Brosnan has
• Knife-edge: the top 20 elite men were separated by less than seven seconds in finals, with only 1.176s between first and fifth. Just 6.578s separated the top five elite women
• Not Lachie-ing modesty: Stevens-McNab talked himself down in his post-run TV interview, saying his run was ‘nothing special’ – we disagree, it was nuts
• Never say never: Greg Minnaar’s illustrious career came to a graceful end in MSA as he made it into finals in his last-ever World Cup as a full-time pro. Minnaar’s international racing career started in 1997, when XC World Cups were still being won on cable v-brakes. Since then, he’s won four elite DH World Championships and three DH World Cup series titles. His first World Cup win was in 2001; his latest in 2020 (he also won World Champs in 2021 age 39). As a pro, he’s raced for Animal-Orange, Global Racing, Haro-Lee Dungarees, G-Cross Honda, Santa Cruz Syndicate and Norco Race Division. But will we see him back racing part-time?
• Full results and season standings here

Continued below…

• It isn’t over until it’s over: Loic Bruni and Höll wrapped up the series titles at the last race in Loudenvielle, France. But things were far from settled elsewhere in the top three. Brosnan’s win rocketed him from sixth to second in the standings; Amaury Pierron missed the race after breaking his hand in practice and dropped to third overall – still a good result by anyone’s standards, especially after breaking his neck in 2023. In the women’s, Cabirou’s win moved her from third to second in the overall, edging her ahead of Tahnée Seagrave (who hurt her hand in practice) in third. Congratulations everyone and thank you for keeping us on the edge of our seats all year!
• Gift gaffe: the series overall podiums were straight after racing and on a tight timeline (see below). The elite women overall podium featured five riders, but elite men only had three. Three or five, which will it be in 2025?
• Double trouble: Max and Till Alran took first and second in junior men – the first time ever twins have gone 1-2 in a DH World Cup (surely we don’t need to fact check that one?). Max also set the fastest time of the day in finals with a 3:53.196, over five seconds clear of his brother and almost a second quicker than Brosnan’s winning elite time…
• …but: Brosnan arguably had worse conditions as the rain came down, and he set the fastest time of the weekend in semi-finals on Friday with 3:42.195. Rain overnight, fog all day and rain for the elites slowed things down across the board on Saturday. Anyway, all this power family chat harks back to when the Athertons won men and women’s downhill (Gee and Rachel) and men’s 4X (Dan) in Andorra, 2008
• More history: search out the replay of Danny Hart’s 2016 MSA winning run – still looks hell-a fast! You can see it in our 2016 DH yearbook too
• Current future greats: van Leuven won the junior women’s World Championships and the World Cup overall this year – no mean feat with the current crop of talented juniors (Höll did the double as a junior in 2018 and 2019, and in 2023 and 2024 as an elite). In 2025 she and a wave of rapid young racers will be moving into the elite ranks. Things about to get crazy
• Quiz: what do Brosnan, Stevens-McNab, Greenland, Thirion, Cabirou, Höll, Hemstreet and Johnset all have in common?
• Answer: they each achieved at least one junior World Championship medal earlier in their careers and they were all on the elite podium in MSA 2024. Is that a bit tenuous?
• Continuing that theme: 23%ish (7/30) of elite men finalists in MSA have also been junior World Champion. Brosnan, Greenland, Rude, Vergier, A’hern, Bruni and Iles all have at least one junior World Championships win to their name
• Canadian dream: Hemstreet’s season ended on a high in her first World Cup finals of the year and her first-ever elite podium, finishing second right at home in Canada (well, according to Google Maps it’s about 5,000km – a mere 49-hour drive – from where she lives on the other side of the country to MSA. For perspective, Timbuktu to Loudenvielle is 4,500km)
• Highly scheduled: television programming meant tight times between racing and podium celebrations. There were two minutes planned in from the last junior woman finishing her run until their podium. Junior men only got one minute from track to podium. Elites had a luxurious three minutes
• Don’t panic: gondola breakdowns caused a delay during elite practice and on finals day some elite men got stuck in the lift on the way to their finals runs, Bruni included
• Brand power: Commencal bikes won both junior races and both junior series titles, and Commencal-Muc Off won the 2024 team overall. The brand won’t be slowing down anytime soon

More below…

• Handsfree at last: clear vision is always part of the battle in a rainy race. In MSA, there’s barely a metre of track where you can safely (or unsafely for that matter) take a hand off to pull a lens-clearing roll-off or throw a piece of plastic into the forest. And to think that Bluetooth goggle roll-offs have existed for over a decade! For only $89 you can pick up a set of Redraven Speedviews on eBay, described by the seller thus: ‘Not sure if it works, might be good for parts’
• Creative accounting: team budgets vary massively at the top level. Semi-reliable intel tells us the highest spending teams with riders on elite podiums in MSA splash as much as 10 times more across the season than the lowest spenders. How will the extra races in the 2025 calendar affect teams already stretching their spends?
• Veering: talking of five-person podiums – and we know we’ve linked to this several times before but don’t care – remember the article team manager Martin Whiteley wrote for us about the origins of the five-person podium in mountain biking? Read it here
• Gutted: Matt Walker (the UK one) was on course for a stellar result. He won elite men’s qualifying and was fastest in semi-finals until a crash. That put him back in the results and he missed the cut for finals. What a dream ending a big result could have been for his team, Madison-Saracen, in its last-ever World Cup (the team owner said in a statement that extra events in the 2025 calendar and changes to the World Cup format made them reassess and, unfortunately, close)
• Speed freaks: Stevens-McNab and Myriam Nicole won the race-within-a-race, going fastest through the speed trap to win $500 apiece from Ed Bull Media House, BK Sport and Crankbrothers. How many racers will now turn their off-season training focus to all-out speed?
• Enduro World Cup: Richie Rude finished 7th in finals to win the annual MSA EDR, but Luke Meier-Smith was just behind him, finishing second in 11th. Kasper Woolley was third in 18th. Hattie Harnden won the women’s EDR with 12th in semi-finals, one place behind downhill convert Gloria Scarsi. Glad we got that cleared up
• Dave’s facts: according to a comprehensive study by Misspent Summers statistician Dave, who watched the replay while having a cup of tea, there were no punctures or notable mechanicals in elite finals. Assuming it is true, which to be completely honest it might not be, how rare is that?
• MSA firsts: amazingly, MSA was Aaron Gwin’s first-ever semi-final. The five-time overall World Cup winner crashed and bust his arm at the 2023 season opener – the first race ever with a semi-final – and has only just got back to full health (he made it into finals at round six in Loudenvielle, but semi-finals was cancelled there). He scored seventh in semis and twelfth in finals in MSA. As semis are likely being scrapped for 2025 (RIP), MSA was not only his first but probably also his last semi-final
• MSA farewells: Saracen, Dorval, Minnaar, Brannigan, Aaron_yo, semis, MTB podiums
• Representing: big up Propain Positive and Morgane Charre for making Misspent Summers look much cooler than we are and sporting our logos in MSA
• Thanks: a huge thank you to everyone making our racing coverage possible. To Boris, Seb and Sven for their outstanding photography, all the contributors and writers, the brands supporting our work and you for reading. This year has been a blast and we’re looking forward to carrying on the action through the off-season with our regular newsletters
• Get involved: if you like our stuff and want to contribute to our work, we kindly ask you to consider pre-ordering our latest yearbooks in our Super Supporter Bundle. Every order on our store helps us continue recording the history of mountain biking. Massive thanks to everyone who has already ordered!