The World came to the Catskills this past weekend for the Windham World Cup Mountain Bike Festival. Apropos to the designation of the event, my race preparation was world class, if by preparation you mean irrigating your glycogen system with hops and plundering the playground next to your hotel with your blitzed non-racing friends the night before. The course, befitting of its UCI status, was a mix of technical woods sections, grinding dirt climbs and fast run-outs to the base lodge. It was also, perhaps owing to my race preparation, seemingly entirely uphill. To muddle things further was my observation on Saturday that the elite pro class was traveling exclusively downhill. And while the prevalence of "rigs" and tattoos confirmed that there was indeed a World Cup downhill event running concurrently, I was reasonably sure that the pro XC riders were on the same course as the rest of us. I don't know if, in cycling-crazed Europe, the organizers let the plain folk ride the same course as the pros, but I found it to be one of the more compelling aspects of the weekend and one that made an overnight stay more feasible for the sheer entertainment value of laughing at my relative level of suck, which happened to be pretty high on Sunday.
It's tempting to think that Windham, New York is a lot like its fellow World Cup host towns in the summer in that it's kind of a remote and sleepy off-season place until a big event like the World Cup comes in. Of course, in Europe, they probably know Florian Vogel from Mathias Fluckinger. I'm a pretty regular reader of cycling and can't say that I do. In fact, it took me two laps to recognize that Adam Craig was wearing a Rabobank kit. I only hope that there were enough "informed" spectators who offered a little more recognition than, "Hey, there goes that guy who only uses three bolts on his disc rotor." That's partly due to the fact that, on course, these guys were flat out flying. I appreciate that even more after racing the same course on Sunday and spending a pathetic amount of time in the small ring. I also realized that there is no place better than in the middle of the woods at a big event like the Windham World Cup to watch people who are actually good enough to get paid to do this stuff. Oddly, there's also no better place to be more clueless about how the events of a race are actually unfolding than in the middle of the racecourse itself. I now feel better about never going to France to see the Tour.
Cat 1s did 4 laps around the 3 1/2-mile course. I thought about quitting every one of those laps. But the more times around the course, the more I got used to its punchy little climbs and fast descents. The course would alternate between straddling the resort's main slopes and cutting through its rocky, rooted woods. It was technical like you'd expect for terrain in the Northeast but not insanely so like the old National XC course at Mt. Snow sometimes was. There was talk about how the World Cup riders would handle a few of the bridges on the course. That prediction wound up being wildly inaccurate. I know, shocking, considering it came from the Internet. As it turned out, the bridges were too wide and grippy to cause the slightest shudder even among the first timers at the race.
The expo area was the expo area. Spent very little time there. Between the XC races, DH, four cross and trials demos, there was always a better place to spectate.
