After 60 hours of continuous travel I reached my destination in Slovakia welcomed by 30 degree sunshine, big mountains and friendly locals speaking only Slovak. On arrival I promptly brought some good quality topo maps of the surrounding areas and had a fun 3 days exploring and trying to get my natural compass reading north instead of south.
The first weekend of racing was also WRE's with most countries represented with the notable exception of Czech Rep and naturally the French. The first race was a shock to the system with the lack of English instructions, ex communist quality organisation and interesting mapping standards getting the better of me mentally. The actual landscape is very similar to riding in many parts of NZ with big hills, forests with a mixture of technical and fast paced tracks making it a mountain bikers heaven. Day two with the mind fully focussed and lowered expectations of map quality produced a much better result only to be disqualified. The light on the control worked, although it didn't beeb and even though another competitor vouched for seeing me at the control the official attitude was "as you were not in the top 3 we can't do anything about it". Pity as the WRE points for coming 20th were sorely needed.
Two interesting aspects of this race was the number of times people cut through the forest and even through peoples properties, back fences, verandas and all. The other was a number of controls were on streets with cars, pedestrians and other cyclists adding to the challenges of map reading.
Next stop was the beautiful town of Banska Bystrica were the MTBO World Champs are being hosted in September. Staying in a beautiful village about 20mins from the town we were to complete a 5 day official training programme. But first things first we had to be introduced to ex iron curtain capitalism which in basic terms is about charging foreigners twice as much as the normal advertised price and make them pay in Euro not the local currency at a hefty exchange rate margin in favour of the host.
I teamed up with the British & Irish team and was very thankful to speak English again. I had quickly learnt enough Slovak to order food & coffee, get directions and do laundry etc but after a while you do crave normal conversation. Between the official training and what we made up we learnt a fair bit or should that read we made lots of mistakes. Trying to adjust your thinking to "you are not limited by just riding on tracks, you can travel anywhere" was a big part of proceedings. Technically this does mean in a wooded area carrying your bike 30cm above the ground but I have yet to see anyone do this which leads to the dilemma do I "cheat" and do what everyone else is doing to be competitive or take the moral high ground. I think Sean Fitzpatrick would agree with my decision that it is only cheating if you are caught.
From Slovakia I then travelled to Czech Republic and the home of Pilsen beer. This fact is not taken lightly by the locals and in fact whether the Czechs or the Slovaks drink more beer is as contentious amongst the two peoples as whether the All Blacks or Wallabies are the better side. About 600 people turned out for five days of racing, drinking and general fun. The event was extremely well run, the maps were great and the level of competition extremely high. Michal Glowacki who is also in the NZ MTBO team joined me from his base in Norway and did extremely well given his limited MTBO experience. Despite my infuriatingly almost customary "10 minute mistake" I managed to finish the series in 26th place out of 67 elite riders. The riding was fairly flat with very fast tracks and so much choice. In fact it was so hard to ride fast as there were so many decision points.
From here Michal and I travelled to Brno also in the Czech Republic to compete in the two day Cyclic Saga equivalent Bike Adventure. After so many hot days and having got rid of the cycle top arm burn marks the weather changed to what I had left in NZ, rain, mud and more rain. It certainly made for a fun race and everything about the two days with the exception of english translation was fantastic. Good maps, accurate control setting, great riding trails and beautiful scenery. On the first day like many other competitors we bit off more than we could chew and were placed 86th overnight. The next day we went for a more simple approach and improved our days placing to 20th but that still left us 55th overall out of around 500 teams.
The next race I wanted to do was in Italy so I scheduled the trip so I could also catch a couple of the mountain stages of Tour de France. It didn't look far on the map but after nearly 20 hours on trains I arrived in Moutiers. This was about 20km from Courcheval and I had about an hour before the riders were due so pack and all I began the 1600m ascent to the summit. The applause I got from the thousands of people packing the road to the summit was amazing, no wonder the real racers go so fast! After out foxing the first half dozen police I was finally stopped only about halfway to the top just before the front riders came through. It still gives me goosebumps seeing the look in the eyes of the top competitors. The first two riders looking fearful knowing they were minutes away from being mown down, Armstong sitting at the back of the flying blue wedge all concentration but yet to have to push hard, Basso serene in the face of knowing the hour of truth was upon him and Ullrich fighting mad having just been dropped 10secs from the front bunch. The following I travelled to Briancon for the race finish and was able to spend time amongst the support crews, mechanics and huge 40 foot trucks carrying all the necessary and unnecessary toys of boys where money is no object. Quite inspirational.
From France I needed to cut back through the mountains to get to Italy and the Dolomites in the north near were I would be racing. With a mixture of train and biking I arrived at a stunning little village in The Valley of the Sun that was to be home for the next week. I love Italy and easily this week was the highlight of the trip despite the rather boring and dangerous "road mtbo" the competition turned out to be. The old lady I stayed with taught me Italian in exchange for English, her husband poured liberal toasts of his dandelion liquor and their son pointed out the best places to explore on my maps. my favourite day was an 80km cycle with about 3000m of climbing up into the Brenti Dolomiti. Just fantastic scenery with great bike tracks and even via ferrata if you didn't have a bike. The weather started out about 34 degrees but changed to a huge thunder and lightening storm. After enduring the strom for about 40mins I arrived at a rifugio beside a stunning little lake and had the best cappuchino with real cream I have ever tasted. Even better than those meals you look forward to in a Southern Traverse transition. On the competition front on the first day I managed a surprising win on the short course mainly forest stafetta competion but the roads and villages got the better of me on the second day to finish 15th. One noteable thing was the amount of children at this event. In both previous countries there had been a lot but in Italy it was totally dominated my youngsters with only Poland later in my travels eclispsing this.
I was pretty keen to see the end the seven year era of the Lance Armstrong so decided to travel from Italy to Paris via Prague. Up until now I had had a fairly good run on trains with my bike but then I hadn't really met the Germans. Apparently I parked my bike on the wrong side of the carriage so after an announcement in German they got the police to cut the lock and take my bike away. I was oblivious to this and only learnt a couple of hours later in broken english from the refreshment man what had happened. Hence began a 12 hour nightmare of fleeing Germany with my bike without being arrested, shot or paying twice for my ticket. It was all worth it though for the experience I had in Paris. The atmosphere, the locals, the food, the buildings, the history it really is something and it was only experiencing this I realised why the French can sometimes be impossible and arrogant. They are still learning how to deal with queues as I found at the airport taking 1 1/2 hours to get through passport control but no worries they just hold the flight up if you are not on it.
Back in Prague I picked up gear that I had stowed earlier in my trip and headed for Poland. This was the most enjoyable & competitive racing of the whole trip.
By now I had got to know most of the international competitors and as english was the common language we could all communicate at a reasonable level. Quite funny being regularly corrected for supposed incorrect pronounciation of the mother tounge. I teamed up here with a couple of Brits again and once we got past the now familiar capitalist you pay more and get less mentality we had a fabulous stay beside a large lake. I was starting to feel that things were coming together menatlly for me as I was starting to get several fastest splits between controls. On the second day of racing I ended up second by 22 secs despite making a 1 minute lazy route choice error. As I had now raced myself into fitness I found taking the more aggressive direct routes paying off with time savings. For the relay racing as team GBR we ended up winning much to the surprise of the locals.
I finished the five days 11th out of 60 elite men but more importantly got the confidence that I could beat the best by not making mistakes and taking it slightly slower at the right times.
I head back to Europe next week where I will meet up with Rob Garden (NZ team manager) Marquita Gelderman, Michal Glowacki & Greg Barbour. We will compete in the WRE in Czech Rep 27th & 28th August before heading into Slovakia for a couple of warm up races and the World Champs from 6th - 11th Sept.