Professional mountain biker Yolandi du Toit writes about her experience at this year’s UCI MTB Marathon World Championships.
The most prestigious marathon MTB event on the international calendar visited African shores for the first time in its eleven year history.
South Africa played host to the 2014 Mountain Bike Marathon World Championships which took place at Cascades in Pietermaritzburg on June 29.
136 men and women from 31 nations and six continents took to the start, all in search of the coveted UCI rainbow striped world champion jersey.
The weekend’s action got underway with the Rainbow Challenge (age categories) on the Saturday followed by the Elite World Championships on Sunday. This made for a full and fun weekend of MTB racing.
Two weeks before the event was set to take place, Cycling South Africa announced the team which would represent our country at the World Championships.
I was honoured to be part of the six rider national ladies team alongside Robyn de Groot, Candice Neethling, Jeannie Dreyer, Ashleigh Moffatt and Amy McDougall.
In the past I have participated in four World Championships but they were all road racing events so this would be my first time toeing the start of a MTB World Champs.
For this reason I didn’t know what to expect, yet I was very excited to line up alongside the best in the World and was determined to make the best of the opportunity.
The event started and finished at Cascade MTB Park and in our race we were to cover a total distance of 74km which included 2159m of climbing.
During SA champs a fortnight ago, I got to see most of the Worlds course only missing out on a ‘new’ 24km loop laid out in the Umgeni Valley Nature Reserve.
Read the full race report here.
