Hello,

From Leogang to Val di Sole, Austria to Italy, greasy roots to, er, greasy roots, we’ve been on the road documenting the latest downhill and enduro World Cups for our end of year books.

As always, we’ve been making plenty of notes along the way and we hope you’ve been enjoying our coverage through these newsletters, our socials and our Long ‘Views YouTube.

Below you’ll find some recap notes and photos from Leogang DH plus some warm-up notes from Val di Sole. Big thank you to Sven, Boris and Seb for the photos.

Qualifying and semi-finals are today, Friday, and the race is on Saturday (cross-country is on Sunday). We’ve made a race hub where you can find useful info, videos and timing. Check it out here.

Hope you enjoy looking through.

Cheers,

James
+the Misspent Summers team

PRODUCT: SPENT 2

SLIP AND SLIDE: recap notes from a variable Leogang DH World Cup 2024

• Results: Elite men: 1 Loic Bruni 3:05.523, 2 Finn Iles +2.394, 3 Lachlan Stevens-McNab +3.115. Series leader: Bruni. Elite women: 1 Valentina Höll 3:40.141, 2 Anna Newkirk +7.102, 3 Myriam Nicole +7.839. Series leader: Höll. Junior men: 1 Max Alran 3:17.292, 2 Dane Jewett +0.419, 3 Mike Huter +2.877. Leader: Jewett. Junior women: 1 Erice Van Leuven 3:54.132, 2 Eliana Hulsebosch +4.718, 3 Heather Wilson +4.743. Leader: Wilson
• Full results and standings after Leogang here
• Ears up: listen to our ‘Long Views’ episode from Leogang, with various interviews by Sven including Vali Höll, Loic Bruni, Finn Iles, Brett Tippie, Anna Newkirk and more
• Word: burnt
• Vibe: nervous mornings in unpredictable conditions, but generally good times had by all. Leogang’s been on the DH World Cup and Champs circuit since 2010 and riders have warmed to it over the years. Everything’s in one place near the lift, the track’s improved a lot and the organisers always make a big effort. Smiles all round
• Big gainz: Will Swinden leads The Race Companion’s fantasy league after three rounds
• Unchecked fact: Leogang claimed to be the 210^th UCI DH World Cup in history
• ACRNM: talking of the UCI, on the cycling organisation’s MTB history page, it uses all the official abbreviations for the MTB disciplines like XCO, XCC, DHI, ETC. For enduro it uses END, not EDR as has been used in MTB World Series communications, results, etc. since enduro became an official World Cup discipline last year. Kind of prefer END, just saying
• Rain game: thunderstorms and rain every night during the week (including a storm on Saturday so severe there was no electricity in the valley for several hours) and drying conditions daily left the track surface far from ideal. It was neither mud nor dust bath; slick grass, shiny roots and invisible suction patches could throw riders head over heel at any moment
• No pain no gains: Finn Iles fell foul and hurt his hand then sat out a lot of the weekend, including only crossing the start line then pulling to the side of the course in his qualifying and semi-finals runs on Saturday (as a Protected – with a capital P – rider, Iles automatically went straight to finals, only needing to break the timing beam in qualis and semis). Despite his lack of time on the track – or perhaps because of it – Iles finished second in finals, his best result since Val di Sole 2023
• Not finnished yet: talking of Iles, his World Cup career-long bike sponsor, Specialized, is celebrating 50 years since the company was founded in 1974 (#maths). There’s a nice old poster about not getting a real job on Spesh’s About page

Continued below…

• Advert: shout out to Maxxis who, despite us putting the wrong ad in our 2023 enduro yearbook, are back supporting Misspent Summers in 2024. This is us ‘fessing up to the mess up and saying thank you to Maxxis and all the fantastic brands that help us record mountain biking’s history. Find out what bike brands support our yearbooks here. Cheers
• The only way is up: after round three in 2022, pre-semi-finals and an updated points structure, which were introduced in 2023, Amaury Pierron and Camille Balanche led the series with 580 and 685 points respectively; Pierron had about 30% more points than second place, Balanche 23% more than second. This year, Bruni and Höll lead the series after three rounds with 997 and 960 points each; that’s about 47% and 43% more than their nearest rivals
• Quote: ‘Welcome to the mess’
• On a tangent, have you seen that Global Cycling Network, the YouTube cycling giant that owns GMBN and EMBN, just bought itself back from the company that bought it in 2021 – one Warner Bros. Discovery. You might remember that WBD shuttered the live cycling streaming part of GCN last year, a move GCN founder Simon Wear called ‘disappointing’. WBD also bought ESO Sports, the company formed by Chris Ball and his associates to run the Enduro World Series (Ball and WBD have been running the entire MTB World Cup series and broadcast since 2022) . ESO was merged into WBD last year. What next? Read about the GCN buy back on road.cc here
• Opinion: if you blow a tyre off the rim in the last 100m of the track, should you walk it back to the pits so your mechanic doesn’t have to panic build a new wheel, or is it OK to roll it through the mud and rocks?
• Alt competition: Commencal win the silent bikes award followed by Specialized in second and Pivot in third
• Red flag to a bull: poor Asa Vermette crashed in his race run but jumped up and carried on racing, aiming to salvage points for the junior overall title chase. Unfortunately, he stopped for a red flag coming into the lower woods; on closer inspection, the flag turned out to be a spectator with a red and white flag just excitedly encouraging their idols
• Convincing on-screen heart rate reaction: ‘I believe it’
• Intelligent stuff we totally understand: 2023 is the year of the electronic suspension gadget. Loic Bruni and Finn Iles were running homemade looking suspension switches seemingly with multiple settings; SRAM-RockShox sponsored riders had some version of Flight Attendant wizardry; other riders had various manual and electronic variants of the theme. Misspent Summers field reporter Chris Kilmurray of Point1Athletic had a highly complicated calculation that bet if Luca Shaw went even faster than usual on the Motorway section (sector three) of the track, his clever suspension was probably helping. Despite nodding sincerely and rubbing our chins, we in fact only understood less than 1% of what Kilmurray explained to us about his theory, so you’ll have to wait to read all about it in the next Hurly Burly. Either way, Shaw was indeed rapid on the Motorway, Vali Höll had the same RockShox stuff as Shaw and she won elite women’s by a mile, and Bruni and Iles took a 1-2 in the men’s
• History innit: look back at Hurly Burly 2016, our first-ever book, and you’ll find echoes of 2024. Leogang was round three, it rained on and off, the track rutted up and threw riders off their bikes, there were some moans about the course but in the end the racing was excellent and everyone had a good time. Also at that event, Rachel Atherton scored her tenth World Cup win in a row and 30^th career win, Aaron Gwin blitzed the competition to take his 16^th career World Cup win (with a chain – his famous chainless win was in 2015), and Josh Bryceland raced on flat pedals in one of his last* World Cups (*cough)
• Unsung heroes: Lachlan Stevens-McNab’s third place in elite men is our highlight of the race. Huge congratulations to the Kiwi racing his third-ever elite finals and to his team, the relatively small (in resources compared to other podium-level setups) Union by Steel City Media. The team also got second in junior women with Ellie Hulsebosch. Shout out to our pal, Union team manager-driver-chef-supporter Rose

More below…

MEANWHILE IN ITALY…
Fast-forwarding back to the present day, riders, teams and Misspent Summers roving reporters are now in Val di Sole, Italy, for round four, where recent rain and some extra turns have made for a brutally slippery and hard to handle Black Snake (that’s the name of the track).

Now, we’re going to try something different, going back in time again with some random memories from previous races here and cuttings from the seven editions (and counting) of Hurly Burly:

• HB 2016: VDS hosts DH World Champs for the second time (the first was in 2008), with Danny Hart and Rachel Atherton taking the elite wins. Finn Iles left practice on a backboard after a nasty crash but made it back for finals and won the junior World Champ title; Alessia Missiaggia won junior women’s
• HB 2017: Greg Minnaar has had a rollercoaster of luck in VDS. This time, things didn’t go his way. He arrived in Italy leading the series, but dodged death in practice in a crash so violent it snapped his bike like a twig. In finals, his wheel exploded and, depleted, he walked it home across the finish line. Aaron Gwin, who’d had some tyre trouble of his own a couple of rounds earlier, capitalised on Minnaar’s woes and took the race win and series title to boot
• HB 2018: an injured Gee Atherton used Velcro to attach his hand to the bars. Amaury Pierron took his third World Cup win in a row. And Tahnée Seagrave won VDS for the second time in as many years
• HB 2019: changeable weather made the course even harder than usual and wreaked havoc with qualifying. Joe Breeden qualified first in elite men and rode well for 25^th in finals. Another Brit, one Laurie Greenland, took his first-ever World Cup win. Marine Cabirou won elite women’s with one of the biggest margins in recent memory – nearly 12 seconds
• HB 2021: Myriam Nicole wins World Championships in the third time VDS hosts the champs, her second elite title. But Greg Minnaar’s fourth career title – his first was in 2003 – is the story of the race
• HB 2022: at the season finale in VDS, Loris Vergier and Myriam Nicole took the race wins, with Amaury Pierron and Camille Balanche taking the series titles. This was the end of an era, the last race with Rob Warner’s trademark ‘look at the time’ passionate commentary and a move from Red Bull as the World Cup broadcast partner to Warner Bros Discovery. Our reporter, George Gore Browne, wrote: ‘As evening turned to night on the last day of school, horns blew, chainsaws revved, euro techno blasted and an innocent moped went up in flames. One thing was clear: the spirit of downhill was alive, solid and non-negotiable’
• HB 2023: Jackson Goldstone skipped his way to his first elite World Cup win; Vali Höll took her second victory in a row. Riders and organisers were still figuring out the new semi-finals format. And media too: we said ‘Bernard Kerr … qualified 28^th in the semi’ – maybe a joke, likely plain confusion (we still haven’t worked out the protected and Protected rider statuses). We also said ‘the track turned into a patchwork of dry, wet, and areas of clear uncertainty…’
• …which leads us nicely into: all the above races were dusty and dry or at least drying. The first day of practice this year was absolute carnage, with muddy puddles aplenty, sniper roots and danger rocks everywhere and endless heavy slams (Bernard Kerr ended run two in an ambulance; luckily he was back at the venue later in the day but won’t be racing this weekend). There’s more rain and storms forecast for Saturday – finals day (cross-country is on Sunday) during the day. Fingers crossed for a fair race and good luck to all!
• Discover: where to watch this weekend’s race here
• Schedule and race book here
• Watch the VDS press conference, including interviews with Riley Amos, Martina Berta, Luca Schwarzbauer, Finn Iles, Tahnée Seagrave and Marine Cabirou, here
• Pop in: we hope to see you at our pop-up exhibition and store/hangout in Les Gets this 28 June-7 July. More info coming soon!