This weekend the Marco Pantani Memorial Cycle Race comes to Les 2 Alpes. Today entrants in the Open Challenge are riding as fast as possible up the 9km road into resort and the fastest time is currently 21 minutes. Tomorrow the cyclists will ride the long or short course, taking them either 164km or 64km across local mountain passes.
It still seems strange to me that a whole weekend in a French resort is dedicated to the memory of an Italian cyclist who died from a cocaine overdose aged 34. There’s no disputing his achievements as a professional cyclist and he still holds the time for the fastest ascent of Alpe d’Huez’s 21 bends (00:37:35), but neither can you escape the fact that his career was marred by rumours of drug and alcohol abuse.
For now though, the race provides a challenge for hundreds of cyclists including friends in the Polar Bear Pub team (Kelly, Paul, James and James) who are competing tomorrow… good luck guys!
British rider Hazel Wakefield stunned herself and her team-mates by finishing top in the female category of this year’s downhill race, the Mountain of Hell. With a time of 00:39:09 she beat off fierce French competition but had no expectations of a place on the podium. The 27 year old isn’t a professional rider and came out to Les 2 Alpes for the first time this weekend with a group of friends from the Cornwall Freeriders club.
Filmed in Alpe d’Huez and Allemont this morning, the latest video from Destination Oisans brings you the speed and the snow of today’s Mega Ladies race. Hope you enjoy it…
Content with its status as a mecca for cyclists, this week Alpe d’Huez adjusts its loyalties and welcomes the chunky tyres, full body armour and death-defying speeds of the sport’s rowdy younger siblings, the mountain bikers. It’s Megavalanche week and if you’ve not heard of this event before, here are some stats: 2000 riders; 40% Brits; 1450m vertical drop to qualify; 2600m vertical drop in the final; fastest recorded time: 45minutes, 37 seconds. It’s mental!
And I’ll be there over the weekend to take a few photos and catch some of the race on video. There’s just one slight problem. It’ll take me about about twice as long as the competitors to get from start to finish, and that’s not even on a bike. I’ll be recording in the snow at the top of Pic Blanc, 3330m, and at the finish line down in Allemont at 730m. The finals take place on Saturday (Ladies and Mega Challenger) and Sunday (Megavalanche and Mega Amateurs) and with temperatures hovering around 30ºC, it’s bound to be a hot and sweaty weekend. Check in later for photos, videos and results.
This year’s freestyle ski and snowboard competition, the Kumi Yama, proved to be a showcase for some epic riding. The eventual winners of the amateur Slopestyle ski competition were Bopcrew, and Bomb Squad on snowboards. In the professional event the winners were Elvis Harsheim, Nicolas Vuigner and Markus Eder on skis, and Matthieu Crepel, Alluar Ricciardi and Arthur Longo. Longo is also a Deux Alpes local and competed at this year’s Olympic Games.
The prize for Best Trick on skis was won by Bapiste Collomb Patton and there were joint winners in the snowboard category: Johan Baisamy and Kazu Kokubo. In the Superpipe, the winners were Nivo Bijonsen on skis and Kazu Kokubo on snowboard. The photography prize, a trip to Japan and a huge goodie bag, was won by David Tchag.
Today was the final of the Kumi Yama’s invitational Superpipe competition and – as always – the talent was mixed. You’d expect riders that have been invited to take part to be of a certain standard, but the quality of tricks was hugely varied. Some riders barely managed to reach the top of the wall, let alone get any air. Of course, I’m far from an expert myself, and have been known to snow-plough down the pipe screaming. But that’s probably why I don’t get invited to compete in this event… and quite rightly so!
This weekend is easily the busiest of the summer as thousands of people descend on the Oisans region for a variety of events. In Les 2 Alpes there’s freestyle ski and snowboard event, the Kumi Yama, and the Raidlight Trail on Sunday. In Alpe d’Huez it’s all about road bikes with La Marmotte taking place on Saturday and the Ascent of the 21 Bends on Sunday.
It’s one of those weekends when you need to be in at least two places at once and manage without sleep or food in order not to miss out. But I’m recovering from a nasty cold and my car is being repaired it’s going even harder than usual to report on all the exciting stuff.
So this year I’m not going to stress about it. I’m going to go where I can go, see what I can see and bring you the best photos and films I can… so stay tuned to Destination Oisans!
The weather in resort has settled into a pattern: scorching in the mornings; torrential rain in the afternoons. It may be frustrating, but at least it’s predictable. Usually weather like this guarantees fresh snow on Les 2 Alpes’ glacier but temperatures are just too high at the moment, with the freeze level at around 4000m. This means we could have some slow take-offs and sticky landings at the weekend, as the summer’s freestyle ski and snowboard comp, the Kumi Yama comes to town…
