World Cup 6 Mont Ste Anne, Canada

Mont Ste Anne has been on the World Cup circuit nearly every year for as long as I can remember. I first raced there in 1997 as a junior and failed to qualify, but since then it has been one of my favourite tracks on the World Cup circuit. My trip started off perfectly as I arrived into Heathrow and the check in lady told me that I had been given a complimentary upgrade to first class !! All the hours I have sat in economy and earned my air miles finally paid off and I enjoyed every hour of my flight, in fact it almost didn’t feel like I was on the plane long enough to get to grips with all the features on my seat ! Unfortunately the luxury ended as we packed ourselves into a hire car and drove for 4 hours up to Mont Ste Anne arriving about midnight.

The next day it just poured with rain and we slid down the track on the course walk. The top section of the course had been changed from previous years, the old high speed rough section was replaced with a new man made section of berms and jumps. I was pretty sad to see the old section taken out as that was one of the best high speed sections of the track and the new section was pretty soft and it was hard to carry good speed. The rest of the track was pretty much unchanged with the addition of one new wood section that was really challenging to keep your speed throughout it.

The first day of practice the sun shone and the track soon dried out by the afternoon and we were back on dry tyres for the timed training session. I put in a full run but was disappointed to be quite a way off the pace. The next day the weather turned again and it looked pretty unsettled. Just as we went up for our qualifying run it started to rain quite a bit, it still wasn’t really heavy rain, just fog and drizzle. I decided to stay on the dry tyres as I knew they would roll better on the open sections of the track. However I am not sure if it was the best choice as the new top section was really slippery. I ended up riding way to conservatively in these conditions and finished up qualifying in 6th, 8 secs off the pace. I was pretty disappointed with my run and would have liked to have walked the track, but my ankle was still not really good enough to walk the long course again. I wanted it to rain more overnight as it then changes the course even more for race day. It did rain quite a lot over night and the practice session on the morning was really entertaining, people sliding all over the place ! I really enjoyed it and felt like I was in a better place mentally to have a good race. The rain stayed off for our race and the track was slowly drying out. I had a pretty good run, I made a few mistakes and rode a few sections far too conservatively, but I was just happy to get through a race run having not crashed and I ended up 3rd, about 4 seconds off the winner Sabrina. It felt great to be back up there scoring some good points and now I just have to build on that for next weekend and get myself back to the top of the podium, something I am more than capable of doing at Bromont.