Well what a weekend as always. Physically demanding, hard, and tough as well as ups and downs and highs and lows for everyone.
As implied above, seeding went well enough, he ended up in P23. Now P23 may not sound amazing but this year is a little different and this race is a little different as National Champs this year brought EVERYONE to the races, all the fastest juniors on the planet for sure. All the lads who've been racing world cups this year were there.
So P23 can sound a bit 'meh' but we were all pretty good with it. Maybe the boy was a little less good with it than we were though
But it was then straight into race runs.
Throughout the weekend he'd gradually dropped his times from a 2m57 on first few runs, down to a 2m 48 in last Elite practice, then down to a 2m 45 in seeding. So he was going the right way, but there's a limit to how much you can make up.
Race run there were a couple of lads who'd messed up in seeding and were stupid fast, NAthan and Felix, Both World Cup racers and qualifiers at World Level, so sadly the lower down riders missed out on their chance of glory as you go slowest to fastest and they'd come in with stupidly fast times. Shame for a few of the lower classes.
But the boy came down and for the first time in 2026 he came over line and got his results and gave himself a YES and a fist pump. You honestly don't know how much that meant after the year we've had of just not quite hitting the results.
As always though, you drop down the page from your place so he slid from P3 to ending up P18 in results.
https://www.rootsandrain.com/event16058 ... /#h-17-18m
But honestly, that was a GREAT P18 for him, really happy with that. The gap to the faster lads was less than it has been and the gap to the groups of fast lads was really less... So it was a brilliant result.
"wouldn't have got near that on the Atherton" was a comment that made me a lot lot happier too. We've deffo done the right thing and whatever i end up selling the bike for, well, it's OK. It's the happiness that counts.
Looking at his splits, split 1 was OK, split 2 great and split 3 was a bit of a nightmare... something to work on there for sure, he could have picked up 10-12th with a decent split 3.. I'm sure that'll get some analysis.
His GF picked up P3 and a podium in Juniors too so that was a great job and another bit of happiness for her
2026-07-13_06-37-54 by steveweeks59, on Flickr
