It was announced on Thursday that the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships will be back in Durango in 2030. Therefore, it’s time to look back to the last (and only) time Durango has hosted the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in 1990.
After the official announcement was made from Rwanda on Thursday that Durango would be hosting the 2030 world championships, Instagram was flooded with posts and stories from all the local professional mountain bikers and off-road racers sharing their excitement.
Former Olympian and one of the local organizers of the event, Todd Wells, was ready to share the news on Instagram on Thursday with a Durango Worlds Instagram account to help the news spread like wildfire.
No one has a better appreciation for the impact the inaugural UCI Mountain Bike World Championships had in Durango than local legend and the first UCI Mountain Bike World Champion, Ned Overend. He withstood the pressure of being a Durango local competing against the best of the world and won the men’s cross-country mountain bike world championship in 1990 in Durango.
“It’s exciting,” Overend said. “It’s cool that people who have gotten into the sport later, who don’t appreciate the early heritage with how mountain bike racing developed and the role that Durango played in it, they can see all over Instagram right now where they’re showing old videos and stuff of it (the 1990 world championships).”
While it’s easy for Overend and others to go on YouTube to look back at the archival footage from 35 years ago at Purgatory Resort, it was much harder for Overend in the late 1980s to find out that the mountain bike world championships were coming to Durango.
There was no social media, no cellphones, computers weren’t widely accessible to the public and there was no email. Therefore, Overend found out about a year in advance that the world championships were coming to Durango. He found out through phone calls, the NORBA News magazine (National Off Road Bicycle Association) and some other monthly or biweekly publication glossy magazines.
Former Iron Horse Bicycle Classic Race Director and local 2030 mountain bike world championship bid organizer Gaige Sippy remembers being a 21-year-old in 1990 who had gotten into mountain biking a few years before 1990. He would comb through the magazines, looking at Overend and John Tomac. Sippy was living in New Mexico at the time and found out the same way Overend did, through the magazines, by phone and through conversations in his local bike shops.
Sippy was so inspired by the world championships being in Durango that he knew he had to be in Durango to witness it.
“It changed my life forever to stand there and watch Ned Overend in person, John Tomac in person, Juli Furtado in person, and Greg Herbold; it made me want to move to Durango,” Sippy said. “I wanted to be part of what was going on here and I did. The next summer, in 1991, I was here and I watched it blossom out of that into what I’ve witnessed the last 35 years.”
Unlike Sippy, Overend and a lot of the top riders like Furtado and Tomac, didn’t have to go anywhere because they lived in Durango. They witnessed Purgatory Resort building the courses and all the Europeans coming early to adjust to the altitude.
Overend and a lot the riders didn’t have to do a lot of training for the 1990 world championships because they’d been competing at the world championships for years.
The world championships in Durango were the first mountain bike world championships to be certified by the UCI. However, it wasn’t the beginning of world championship events in mountain biking. Without a world cycling governing body like the UCI, both the U.S. and Europe held world championships. Overend went and competed in both. Then, the UCI recognized mountain biking and took things over, unifying the sport with one world championship in Durango.
People realized the magnitude of the first UCI Mountain Bike World Championships and they came to Durango. Overend remembers the news conferences full of magazine and newspaper journalists who flocked to Durango to see the world’s best.
With all the attention, Overend felt the pressure, especially because the men’s cross-country race was the last championship event of the week. He mostly kept to himself instead of going to the other races as he locked in on his goal of the world title.
“I wanted to win the race, but I considered myself the favorite, but it’s hard to judge the favorite, because there was a lot of ... unknowns,” Overend said. “There’s a lot of stuff that could have happened.”
What happened was he didn’t crack under the pressure. He was among the leaders the whole race and on the final climb, he was riding it in his granny gear and Tim Gould in second was walking it. Overend got a gap and held it on the descent to victory.
Overend was relieved when he crossed the line as he avoided all the unknowns to be known as the first UCI Mountain Bike World Champion. Press from around the world wanted to talk to him for the next few months before things calmed down.
Now, 35 years later, Sippy and Overend hope the 2030 world championships have a similar affect on the community that the 1990 event did. Overend thinks Purgatory will step up its game with its trail making and help make Durango an international destination for mountain biking.
“If 2030, has some of the impact that 1990 did, it’s going to be incredible,” Sippy said. “Because ’90 was very much a watershed moment for our community ... I realize now how impactful 1990 was to me, and I hope that I can help carry that forward so it can be very impactful for another group of people in 2030.”
bkelly@durangoherald.com
