Friday, December 11, 2009

2009 Supercross Cup Round 4

Sunday was the final round of the this years SuperCross Cup. Roger Aiken had already claimed 1st place overall but 2nd through to 5th was still up in the air with myself, Joe McCall, Lewis Ferguson and Evan Ryan vying for position.

My club, MAD MTB, were the host club running the event in Corcaigh Park. My duties were putting together sandwiches for afterwards (7 loaves of bread!) and putting together a video of the race (which can be seen in this post).

Race winner - Connor McConvey

At 1pm we lined up and started – immediately Roger went to the front and attacked. A few groups formed from the start and I was silly not to be in the lead group (I was following wheels that I should not have been). Towards the end of the first lap I left my group moving after the lead group – a lap or two later, Roger fell off the lead group and we started riding together. We rode well together sharing the workload on a very windy course until with 3 laps to go he had a little trouble in one of the very muddy sections and a gap formed – at this point, I moved off in hunt for third position. On the final lap, with about 600 meters to go I passed Joe on the tarmac section but then things went horribly wrong – my bike skidded to a halt. Looking down, I found my rear derailleur (a beautiful 2010 Force one with about 14 hours of use) mangeled into my wheel. Nothing was moving. With Roger still behind me (somewhere), I picked up the bike, threw it over my shoulder and began to run – oh, I hated the running. I made it around the course to nip in just ahead of Roger with only a couple of seconds to spare.



With my 4th place result, I ended up finishing 2nd overall in the series – my first cyclocross series. I really enjoyed the racing – there was always 6-7 people that could make it onto the podium and that created a great race atmosphere, everything was up for grabs.

The damage

Thanks again to MAD for running the race and K-Capital Source and Cycleways for supporting the events.

More pictures from Ollie.

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