World Cup 2 "Swiss Style"

If you are any kind of bike dork like most of us, you have already seen your share of reports and photos from this past weekends World Cup 2 Race. Champery, Switzerland played host and provided one of the steepest and slickest tracks we have seen in a long time. The course was freshly cut and extremely steep. Steep enough and slick enough to have most seasoned veterans running for flats and sticky rubber. Several riders were seen boasting 230mm rotors! That’s nine inches for us Americans, and we all know that Euros don't see nine inches too often. The best part of the weekend was the rain that fell like the Je'sus himself was flexing his meteorological muscles. The rain fell almost promptly at 4:00 pm. Some clever seeding issues during qualifying would put the would be winner, Matti Lehikoinen on the top podium getting to ride in the dry and watching all the other riders fight there way down. Around the Nissan "Hot Seat" it looked like a detergent commercial's "before and after". Matti's kit all pristine and clean as the other riders looked like members of a Mississippi chain gang. The real talk was how no rider who raced in the mud could seem to break the top ten. In qualifying Hill took the fastest time putting a bucket load of seconds between him and the next rider. As Sam would later put it in an interview with Sven Martin from LitterMag, "Just messin about". As his race time came he exploded onto the course in deep wet mud. He crossed the finish line in 3rd place 1.3 seconds away from the winner. The real kicker is not that he was the only mud rider to break the top ten but that he crashed in his race run, separated from his bike clamored up a small hill to remount and continue on. 1.3 seconds down...Chris Kilmurray from Transcend Magazine said it best: “Schladming '05, Pila '05, Roturua '06, Schladming '06 all were remarkable, crushing wins for Hill that without a doubt must affect the confidence of the worlds best, but what he achieved in Champery '07 will not only smash the confidence of his competitors but will go down as the number 1 moment in recent downhill history.”