Mountainbiking: Crash, bang and a silver

By DAVID LEGGAT

MANCHESTER - Within the space of about five hours, New Zealand's mountain bikers combined doses of anxiety, delight, disaster and frustration, and finished up with a silver medal, a broken arm and a rider mulling over what might have been.

The versatile Susy Pryde, grinning through a battered face, had a silver medal draped round her neck; Sadie Parker-Wynyard was in hospital; and Kashi Leuchs had a highly creditable, if personally disappointing, fourth place beside his name.

Mountain biking is at the gentle end of the extreme sports range, but there was nothing gentle about events in the women's race at the picturesque Rivington Pike course through parkland 45 minutes outside Manchester.

These riders are lively souls, cycling's equivalent to skiing's snowboarders. You have to be to sit on the equivalent of a leather-covered jackhammer for 90 minutes over rugged parkland.

The 6.9km course was at the easier end of the range in terms of technical difficulty. It suited the more powerful riders, but whatever their personal strengths in the saddle, they all had to cope with Snakebite Alley.

Pryde and Parker-Wynyard will have strong memories of that descent about 600m from the finish-line of the circuit.

It consisted of a cobbled track where the stone had worn away, but only in patches.

Everything began well for the silver medallist in the women's road race at the Kuala Lumpur Games four years ago.

She was among the three frontrunners in the field of 15 as they dived down into the Alley on the first of the four laps.

Then she crashed heavily (cue the pun for the day: a case of Pryde coming before a fall).

However, the 28-year-old recovered quickly and maintained a strong presence for the rest of the race. She got to within 5s of eventual winner Chrissy Redden, of Canada, at the top of the technical part of the course.

But Redden's superior skill in that area ensured she was able to hold Pryde off. The key was getting to that portion of the circuit in front.

Pryde could not, and Redden won in 1h 32m 10s. Pryde was 16s back, with Australian Mary Grigson third, a further 23s behind.

Pryde could at least smile through a face which looked as if it had been a few rounds with Lennox Lewis - a terrific shiner and cut lip to go with her left arm in a sling.

She never considered quitting, although saying: "It is quite dangerous to keep racing hard when you hit your head.

"I may pay for it the rest of the season and be in a bit of a hole, but this was one race where you're willing to take the risk."

Pryde gambled by using high-pressure tyres to minimise the risk of puncturing on the Alley, a freewheeling downhill section pock-marked with jagged cobblestones, and said a resulting lack of control led to her fall.

"I was skidding everywhere, but I was willing to take that chance so I wasn't out of the race if I punctured. I was really shooting for this race."

She needed ice on her face after the race and was unsure if she would be able to compete in the road race on Saturday.

The day had a grimmer outcome for Parker-Wynyard, the 32-year-old whose superstitions include naming her bikes - among them Monty, Furry, Reg and Rusty.

What she calls the present model is not known, but depending on the strengths of her superstitions it might be wheeled off to the knackers yard after this.

Descending rapidly into the mouth of the snake for the second time, she crashed badly.

Parker-Wynyard was taken to a nearby hospital in Preston, where the initial suspicion that she had broken both elbows was scaled down.

One elbow was fractured, but the other arm escaped with severe lacerations.

"Sadie had been flying in practice without mishaps," team coach John Lee said."It was a brutal course for equipment. It was brutal on the riders as well.

When Leuchs stepped up to start the men's race, he was ranked second in the Commonwealth and was sure he was up for a strong gold-medal challenge.

Those plans went belly-up on the second lap when, leading the field of 20, he crashed on the same treacherous portion of the circuit.

That was the key moment.

"On the first lap I was feeling great," he said. "But after you crash you lose rhythm a bit. I thought I'd slow down, pace myself and get that rhythm back and go hard again, but it never happened."

Leuchs had to settle for fourth, clocking 1h 58m 42s over the six laps.

Canadian world champion Roland Green won in 1h 52m 48s, with compatriot Seamus McGrath taking second and Liam Killeen, of England, third, 3m 8s ahead of Leuchs.

Full coverage:
nzherald.co.nz/manchester2002

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