Sam Hill vs Gee Atherton at the UCI Downhill in Val di Sole

I’m a little late with this as the latest UCI World Champs round was a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve just come across the footage of Sam Hill on freecaster.tv and just had to post it incase anyone missed the race.

Sam Hill, who dominated the season last year, seems to be back on form. You can’t help but experience an element of disbelief as you watch the video – the guy just floats over roots, rocks and drops as if they weren’t there, and brushes past metre wide trees at speed as if they wouldn’t swat him like a fly were he 5 inches to the left. I know these guys are world class and should be looking impressive, but I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen anyone on a bike and it’s just awesome.

Obviously, that is, until he takes a tumble on the flat within spitting distance of the finishing line! You can see the corner isn’t as simple as it looks at speed as Gee takes a huge bump there too but you’d imagine having conquered the rest of the trail at that speed that Hill would navigate his way past the motorway section and into the winning position. Man, you’ve got to be gutted to be 6 seconds up on the current leader, Steve Peat, and then lose to him by under a second despite having fallen 100 metres from the line.

That’s taking nothing away from Gee Atherton though who came through to win by over 2 seconds, but you can see from the splits that Hill was a fair bit ahead. It comes down to who can stay on though – no point going fast if you can’t finish – so Gee’s the straight winner, but if Sam Hill can do that next time and avoid the costly mistake then they’re going to have a hard time catching him…

[tags]uci downhill, world championship, downhill, mountain, bike, biking[/tags]

Colin

Colin started mountain biking in the early 2000s and has haphazardly, and with barely increasing skill, dragged his bike around the majority of Scotland's trail centres since then. Colin has oodles of hard earned experience in how NOT to do things - listen, be warned and don't repeat his mistakes...   More about Colin... Google+ Colin

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