With the opportunity of a lifetime, thanks to Martyn Salt, I was invited to race the Olympic Test Event at Hadleigh Farm. With over 5,000 spectators I could imagine the atmosphere being huge.
My brother and I headed over to the course at Hadleigh early Friday morning to pick up our training number and get some practice laps in both on Friday and Saturday. The course was mainly all man made with boulders mixed in along with long grass climbs and swooping descents.
With the high standard of riders and my first International experience I wasn’t expecting a good result but just to get the experience and have a good fight for positions.
At 2pm on Sunday with temperatures reaching 26degrees the gun went and we were off, starting on the last row being gridded 43rd it was going to be a battle to try and move up the field.
After the 3rd corner of the small 0.5km start loop a few riders went down in a crash just in front of me, luckily I managed to hop around them and chase for a higher position.
After fighting with elbows, stopping, starting and queuing, we waited at the top of the descents due to a high number of us trying to get onto one singletrack. After making my way up to approx 38th, I suffered a crash damaging my knee and loosing valuable positions.
After a minute my knee stopped hurting and I could eventually push on and start chasing back I only managed to get back to my starting position of 43rd before coming under the 80% cut off time and finishing after 4 laps.
Although I had really good legs, the start was so fast and being gridded on the last row doesn’t help if you don’t move up a few positions before the first singletrack.
However I was there for the experience and atmosphere which was amazing. So many people were cheering me on which made me push harder than ever, so a big thanks to everyone for rooting me on! The atmosphere is going to be huge when there is going to be over 20,000 spectators for the actual Olympics.
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