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A year ago, the world’s elite mountain bikers poured into Beijing for a test event on the Olympic course and the results were not encouraging.
Riders were gagging on the oppressive heat and thick smog. Some were literally vomiting from the double-whammy sucker punch of heat and pollution.
A fast, wide-open course provided few challenges and many were wondering if the Chinese had blown it.
Flash-forward a year and things are very different ahead of Friday’s and Saturday’s races on the Laoshan mountain bike course.
Expense is not a concern for the super-sensitive Chinese, who want everyone leaving Beijing believing that these were the best-organized, best-run Olympics ever.
So when the anxious hosts heard the course might not be up to snuff, they sent in an army of laborers to transform the 4.5km loop.
Gone are the machine-packed doublewide tracks and included a series of drops, berms, rocks, climbs and descents that should put even the best riders to the test.
“We were complaining last year that it wasn’t hard enough, now it might be too hard!” said José Antonio Hermida, silver medalist in Athens 2004. “They’ve put some big stones in the wooded section. It’s up-down, up-down, with no time for recovery. It’s a beautiful course, a hard course. Now we can say it’s a course worth of the Olympic Games.”
Riders got their first preview of the transformed course during Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s training sessions. Most were surprised at what they saw.
Wide, smooth downhill sections have been replaced with a jigsaw of rocks, drops and narrower tracks as crews hauled in huge rocks and boulders to transform what was an easy course into something quite more difficult.
“They’ve made a lot of changes to the course. There are some really technical, steep descents. They added bigger rocks since last year. There are actually too many drops now,” said Bart Brentjens, winner of the first Olympic gold medal in Atlanta 1996 and back for his fourth Olympic Games. “There are drops everywhere. Now it’s more technical, now you need to be a bit more skilled on your bike. I don’t know if it’s necessary. I prefer how it was last year.”
Brentjens has reason to worry. Last year, he was second in the test event in what was a strong performance to feed his optimism that he could earn a record third Olympic medal to go along with his gold and bronze from Athens 2004.
Brentjens crashed a month ago and injured his left wrist, now wrapped in white tape to try to keep it together against the battering course.
While the technical additions might give some room to pause, others are licking their chops.
The non-stop nature of the course, with an endless string of climbs and descents that leaves little or no time for recovery, has cyclocross star Sven Nys in a fighting mood.
“It’s spectacular, explosive. It’s all descents and climbs. It’s very demanding. The climbs are shorter and it suits a crosser. I could not have wished for a better track,” said Nys, who’s refocused on mountain biking so he could earn a ticket to the Olympic Games. “Being here beats every cyclocross for the rest of my life. It gives me goose bumps. I did the same thing over and over for the past three years (with cyclocross). Now I’m on a new bike, on a new track. It’s a new world.”
With the incessant run of climbs and drops, most agree that there’s little room to pass. Narrower sections have been cut out of the dense woods and shrub on the main hill.
Most expect the race to quickly split up into smaller groups, with a survival of the fittest fight to the end.
The addition of so many stones and drops has created enough challenges that choosing the right set-up will prove critical.
“It’s going to be very important which materials and tires you choose,” said Christoph Soukup, the Austrian bomber who finished sixth in the 2008 worlds. “It’s better to go with tubeless tire. I had a puncture because there are a lot of sharp stones. Racing with lightweight tires would be a mistake. It’s better to race with thicker sidewalls.”
The course changes have solved one half of the problem, but the worries about heat and pollution remain.
Rain last week cleared out much of the smog that choked off the Olympic’s first week, but temperatures and ozone have been rebuilding the past two days.
With a 3pm start for both races, heat could be stifling.
“The course suits me and I’m excited about my chances for a medal. I don’t mind the changes in the course at all. It’s more mountain biking, so there’s going to be more distance between riders,” said Lene Byberg, who will play wildcard for Norway with defending Olympic champion Gunn Rita Dahle-Flesjaa falters. “The course isn’t the problem, it’s the heat.”
No matter how much money China throws at the Olympics, there are some things they just cannot control.
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