🔴 FREE, LIVE RACING & RACE TALK 🔴 Leogang World Cup Downhill

Amaury is out for awhile according to the teams Ig story. Broke his C5 and had surgery Monday night

Damn, that is such crap news!! He has been taking a beating the last few years. I hope he heals up well. He will certainly be missed.

I like that VitalMTB has gone the route of big bro VitalMX with discussion threads for each event, but the forum needs some cleaning up otherwise there are like always four parallel discussions all on the same topic.

The MOST exciting rider on the circuit. Dammit. He was plagued with injury before his rise up to winning seasons, but, seems it is back again. Hopefully the rise up is similar as the past.

Is Hill racing all season do we know? Do we think he will qualify?

I think the sears portrait studio sessions of the Syndicate will haunt me forever though and this is clearly the talk of this world cup!

When will Jordan get on the proto bike like Loic and Finn?

Do we know when Pompon is set to comeback?

dear god.... haunting and amazing!

Commencal better put Daprela in a bubble. Teams have to field at least 1 rider or they can’t register as a team next year.

with the new ish rules this year, can’t they sub a racer in at any point?

they should do a PinkSiteRacing and help out some commencal privateers each weekend (dunno if happened more than once).

also not sure Bart liked being a bubble boy.

i think they can but i also just remembered they have Hugo Marini in juniors

-Hill eluded to racing all year, but we'll see based on his results. Surely he'll give it a go for most/all of the season. If it doesn't work out, the retirement seems imminent. No way he's going back to EWS/EDR next year.  
-Might be able to qualify for a couple races this season (if he does them all). Would be helped by a mudder that slows down speeds and favors someone who can get loose on flats. He qualified 120th with no crashes/mechanicals, with a 3:01. Needed 2:54.3 to qualify. That's a big gap considering 60 riders went 7 seconds faster than him. 
-Almost certainly won't make the finals this season unless he's able to turn the corner big time in the next race or two. 
-Flats are more of liability in world cup DH racing now than they were when Sam stepped away. Even Brendog is on them this year looking for speed. I recall someone being interviewed in the past couple years who used to ride flats saying that it's just too high speed now and that a track like Val Di Sole is totally a clip-in track because of how rough and fast it is. ... But if it's wet..!!! 
-I'm a huge Sam Hill fan, just being realistic. The fields are so deep, so fast and so dialed now. 

-I'm thinking Jordan MIGHT get the new bike during the July break. Team is definitely in a weird position now. Dude just won his first elite race on the old bike--you want him to feel comfortable (which he obviously is on the old bike) so he can continue to stack results, but you can't really have your old bike beating your new bike you hope to sell. So, they are probably no pressured to get him on the new one asap, even if it means he's uncomfortable and struggles for the top speed again for a couple races. 

Probably a discussion for another thread, do we think a neck brace could have prevented this? 

I believe Loic won worlds last year on the old/current bike while Finn was riding the proto. 

Yes... But now you have two veteran (one being world champ) riders who should both be better than Jordan (on paper) being potentially beat by the first year elite on the old bike. Much different than last year with two veterans, and one riding the proto. 

Also, the prototype has been around for ~10 months and would likely be going into production by late summer/fall, which was not the case a year ago.  

Jordan may have tried both versions early on and preferred the bike he's on to the proto. It sure doesn't seem like it's slowing him down! 

Youth gone wild?  Not sure I want to type that into a search bar!   

Did I miss something that happened to Amaury Pierron? noticed last week he was a DNS 

Crashed in practice (I think?) and sat out the race due to sore neck. Turns out he fractured his C5 so he's out for a while 

Are you sure about that Junior Women's Finals time?

GMBN' YT channel says it's at 7:10 Eastern, which I think means 4:10 Pacific.

Junior women should be going at 3:45 am PST

12.45 p.m. UCI Downhill World Cup - Final - Women Junior

1.15 p.m. UCI Downhill World Cup - Final - Men Junior

2.00 p.m. Qualification Downhill - Women

2.40 p.m. Qualification Downhill - Men

Why didn’t Grice race last week? #usdh

I don’t think his team was in Europe last week, but they’re here this week. He isn’t on the “factory” team anymore (replaced by Jordan Williams) and will be more focused on domestic races than World Cup. 
 

Reading between the lines: Spesh still believes in him but feel that the full World  Cup experience wasn’t helping him to realize his potential, so he’s on the Generation Specialized team to take a little pressure off and see if it’s better for his development. I’ve also heard a lot of other racers talk about how fast he is but that he didn’t demonstrate that speed at the world cups. 

This stuff is kind of confusing.

The UCI Mountain Bike World Series Youtube channel is showing Elite Semis airing live on YT Thursday, June 15, at 4:30 a.m. Eastern time.

As far as I know, they don't even do the Elite Qualis until Friday, June 16.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEW-4ZYRzXI