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GT News: GT Bicycles UCI World Cup Report

8/3/2009

The Mont St Anne World Cup this past last week was very exciting like usual! Team GT packed up the trailer in a record time because of the help of the full team. We drove of to Bromont, Canada on Monday morning. Tuesday everybody chilled out and went for a training ride. Quite a few people went riding in the bike park in Bromont. At a certain point we had a ‘5 wagon GT Fury train’ cruising down the trails, including myself. Thanks for the great ride Marcel Beer, Mick Hannah, John Canepa and Kevin Aiello!!
 
 
Training runs started on Thursday. Beautiful weather spoiled us after St Anne. The track is various with many serious rocky technical sections and some pedaling as well. A thunderstorm flooded the track in the evening with a non-stop drizzle rain during the night. For the qualifier on Friday we had to deal with proper rainy conditions and watery mud. Most of the riders stayed on dry tires, even on a wet track like this. There were some muddy parts where mud tires would come in handy but in general there were too many steep rock sections that required dry tires.
 
 
On the qualifier it was hard to come down without any mistakes or crashes on a track this technical especially in the wet conditions. Marc Beaumont had a good run finishing a steady 11th just in front of Mick Hannah (12th). Mick slipped a pedal and was sure he could do better in the finals. Kevin Aiello had a smooth fast run making it to a 59th, qualifying in the top 80!
 
 
 
Qualifier DH;
1 Fabien Barel
2 Sam Hill
3 Greg Minnaar
4 Steve Peat
5 Gee Atherton
11 Marc Beaumont
12 Mick Hannah
59 Kevin Aiello
 
 
On  Saturday the weather turned out very nice and warm. The track dried up very fast. From being wet in the morning to semi dry towards the end of training and pretty much dry for the finals. Mick had a solid run finishing 6th. He said, “I’m happy with this result. The track is short and the smallest mistake makes a difference. I had a good smooth run with no major incidents. I finished 1,6sec from Greg Minnaar, who won the race! Of course it is a shame making it that close to the podium, but I’ll be there…. Soon!” Marc said, “I’m stoked to get two good runs in on this track. I’m improving every event and feel confident on my GT Fury. I will get lots of training in next two weeks in Whistler before we head over to Australia for the Worlds.”  Kevin Aiello (18) finished in a strong 48th place being the 3rd junior of the day!!
 
 
Finals DH;
1 Greg Minnaar
2 Fabien Barel
3 Sam Hill
4 Gee Atherton
5 Aaron Gwin
6 Mick Hannah
12 Marc Beaumont
48 Kevin Aiello
 
 
The overalls didn’t change very much;
1 Sam Hill   1219
2 Greg Minnaar  1203
3 Steve Peat   1150
4 Gee Atherton  1078
5 Mick Hannah  929
15 Marc Beaumont  478
 
 
4X:  It definitely was a different track. Let’s call it a mountain bike track where there are a lot of different possibilities to pass, different lines and surprising results. The World Cup leader Jared Graves went out in the first round. Our Swiss proud Roger Rinderknecht qualified 3rd but didn’t make it through the quarter finals. Roger commented, “The track was challenging and very different from the other World Cups. It was fun to ride but very hard to protect your line. This is racing!” Joost Wichmann had a clean run all night and won the race.   
 
 

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