Riley Amos and Ruth Holcomb both tasted first place Thursday at the International Cycling Union Mountain Bike World Championships.
Medals would allude the two junior cyclists from Durango, though. It was last lap heartbreak for the 18-year-old Amos, while the 17-year-old Holcomb battled fatigued legs and the thick mud in Leogang, Austria.
Amos, who went into the junior cross-country mountain bike world championship race ranked No. 1, led the first of four laps before the mud began to take a toll. He fell to fourth on the second lap and had climbed back into third during the third and fourth laps in a heated battle with France’s Luca Martin. On the final climb on the last lap, Amos passed Martin and felt confident heading toward the finish line. But he would crash on the downhill 30 seconds from the finish line. Martin would get around him and edge the American by two seconds at the finish line. Despite the fastest lap times on the first and final laps, Amos placed fourth in 1 hour, 18 minutes, 5 seconds.
“Exhausted,” Amos said of his condition in a phone interview with The Durango Herald. “You are supposed to leave a world championship course feeling that way..”
Amos got a taste of the course Wednesday in the team relay in which he posted the fastest lap time for a junior men’s rider. But a muddy course turned even worse before Thursday morning’s junior cross-country races.
“It was a couple levels worse as far as conditions,” Amos said. “I was off the bike running in multiple spots. Unfortunately, the bike didn’t hold up to it, and I made a couple of mistakes. The mud took the chain off three times. The first time, I couldn’t get it back on there with so much drive in the drive train. I had to clean it off with water bottles for a few minutes to get it to stay on.”
SO FRIGGIN CLOSE. #Leogang2020 pic.twitter.com/FaOWFuM4wm
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The race win went to Lennart-Jan Krayer of Germany. He finished in 1:16:39 That was 40 seconds in front of Switzerland’s Janis Baumann.
It was an all-out race for third place between Amos and Martin to the finish line. Amos was 3:02 in front of fifth-place Oliver Vederso Solvhoj of Denmark and Dario Lillo of Switzerland, who took sixth. A total of 78 riders finished.
“We both knew we were fighting each other for the final spot on the podium,” Amos said. “At the top of the last climb, I got him and led out the final descent. I got tears in my eyes thinking about potentially winning a bronze. But I stuffed it in a corner 30 seconds before the finish. It was a dumb mistake, and I don’t know how it happened. I couldn’t come back from it, and he got me.”
Also for the U.S., Bjorn Riley placed 15th in 1:24:24.
The junior men’s race followed the junior women’s. In her first year racing at the world championships, Durango’s Holcomb had to work hard to get into the front group of the race early after she started 24th. For a brief few seconds, she found her way to the very front after a grueling first-lap effort that saw her post the fourth-fastest time. But the mud and tired legs saw her move back to 15th after the first lap. She held steady but finished 18th in 1:28:25.
“At one point, I was leading for a few seconds. I sat strong in fourth there for awhile,” Holcomb said. “It was a pretty amazing start, which was helpful, but I might have gone out a little too hard. I had my chain come off about five times, and my dropper stopped going down after a few laps. I wasn’t mechanical free, but it could have been worse.”
The race win went to Austria’s Mona Mitterwallner in 1:15:55. That was 1:56 faster that second-place Luisa Daubermann of Germany. Anet Novotna of the Czech Republic was third in 1:18:31.
“Today was not the race I was hoping for or expecting, but I got so much good experience and know my legs can be up there with some of the top girls. My fire is stoked for next year, for sure.”
Boulder’s Madigan Munro led the three American junior women with an eighth-place finish. She was 7:24 behind the winning time. Munro worked her way up from 20th after the first lap with the fourth-best second lap to work into the top 10. Haley Randel was the other American in the race. She finished 44th down two laps.
Holcomb said the mud made the uphills even more tricky than the slippery downhills. She was able to stay on her bike going downhill but had to resort to running her bike on the uphills, much like a cyclo-cross race.
“It was pretty crazy out there,” Holcomb said. “I definitely was expecting the conditions to be bad, but not like that. It was an amazing experience. Not the most fun race ever, but it was a good experience.”
Holcomb will get to race in the junior category again next year. For Amos, it will be a bump to the under-23 level. Only a few short years since he started to train for bike racing, he has proved to be one of the top young riders in the country. And though he didn’t bring home a junior cross-country medal during his two years in the category, he knows the best is yet to come after his first taste of racing in Europe.
“I came to race the best in the world. I wouldn’t trade anything for it,” Amos said. “A lot of people helped to make this happen. Two years ago, I got a chance to travel to Canada with he Bear Development team and USA Cycling, and this became my main goal as a second-year junior racing at the world championships. Two years ago when I won my first national championship, if you had told me I’d be fighting for a world championship, I would not have believed it. The progression has been insane.”
jlivingston@durangoherald.com
