US Open – Vernon, NJ. USA

It was a pretty short drive from Plattekill down to Vernon, but the temperature certainly rose a little on the drive ! We got out the car to a temperature of over 90 degrees farenheit and it was humid with it. It was tough just walking the DH track, so I was not looking forwarding to riding in those conditions ! Fortunately the following day was a little cooler and the track was dry and dusty. Diabalo park is a pretty fun little mountain with mini whistler style trails all over the mountain. It had a great feel to the place and there were loads of people who just seem to come out from New York for the weekend to ride and hang out.

The US open track has always looked great on the videos I have seen, some pretty gnarly rock sections and some wide open fast turns at the bottom. It was much shorter than I had expected and the top technical section was over so fast, any mistakes and you would lose loads of time as there was nowhere to make it back up.

Track conditions changed quite a bit over the few days as we had a big thunderstorm one night with quite a bit of rain. That made the rock sections pretty tricky for the next day of practice. However by race day the track was dry again and it was perfect conditions for racing. I knew that the times would be close on this track as it was so short and there were few places where you could really make up loads of time. I attacked pretty hard in the top section, but after crashing heavily in the morning of the race I rode the main rock garden a little more tentatively than I would have liked, but I got through it fine. I then ran wide exiting the woods and slid out in the loose gravel on the fireroad. I thought I had a rear flat as the bike just felt loose on the fireroad. I then rode the next section of the track quite tentatively until I realised that i must just be imagining it ! Luckily I didn’t lose too much time and managed to just sneak ahead of Jill Kintner to take the win at the US Open. Great to see Jill in her first year of DH putting together some really good riding over the last few weeks and I don’t think it will be long till she will be in contention on the world cup circuit. Melissa Buhl took 3rd spot.

I also took part on the single slalom race, just a timed run down a slalom track. It was a fun little track with some very loose, slippery berms. Having not been on my hardtail since sea otter I was a little sketchy for the first few runs and even in qualifying I nearly missed the landing on the last jump !! However I did enough to round out the weekend with another podium, this time 3rd, behind Jill and Melissa.

It was a fun weekend of riding and another successful one with Andrew taking the win and Justin in 3rd in a packed Word cup field of riders. So great motivation for next weekend where we travel to Scotland for World Cup # 2. Tracy