What a week of racing in Lenzerheide. The new format provided plenty of racing action throughout the week with the semi-finals providing a new challenge for the world’s best.
In the Junior racing, it was great to have the races broadcast live for the first time showing off some of the incredible talent of the sports future stars. For the women, it was Erice Van Leuven who took control of the race topping the podium with a gap of over four seconds to the fastest qualifier Valentina Roa Sanchez. Completing the top three was Lisa Bouladou who was the only rider within ten seconds of the hard-charging race winner.
When it came to the Junior Men it was Christian Hauser who impressed the most as he stormed the lower part of the course to take the win at his first ever World Cup against Trek Factory Racing’s Bodhi Kuhn by 1.62 seconds. Hugo Marini kept things consistent through the splits to hold onto third place.
Fast forward a day and we were given our first chance to see how the new semi-final format works. While it is always great to see more racing the times to finals are pretty short and giving riders an extra race run is definitely going to be a puzzle for the Elite riders to work on this year.
Camille Balanche was the elite women’s rider to beat all week as she was looking fast at her home race, after taking the win in qualifying and semi-finals it looked like a tough task to better her speed. Come finals and we were transported back in time as we once again saw a dominant Rachel Atherton between the tape as the Queen of downhill made her comeback in the most impressive fashion. Rachel stormed through all splits never letting go of the race lead across the whole track, ending the day 0.5 seconds up. While we don’t know Rachel’s plans for the rest of the season it was amazing to see one of the sport’s greats come back to downhill racing in a big way.
The final race of the downhill in Lenzerheide had the ground laid for a wild show as plenty of riders were looking fast and the extra race practice meant everyone was firing on all cylinders. Dakotah Norton and Troy Brosnan were the first riders to really break up the top times but it wouldn’t be until first-year elite racer Jordan Williams made his way down that we saw a potential winning run. Jordan was flying through the splits and was the first rider of the day to breach Loic Bruni’s fastest time from semi-finals. Jordan’s incredible performance was soon met with an injured Jackson Goldstone flying into the 2nd place spot making the top two almost feel like a flashback to the past two years of junior racing. We quickly saw the top riders try and fail to match the speed of the young British rider with a final showdown against his Specialized teammate Loic Bruni ending an amazing hour and a half of racing. Loic was initially looking strong as he went green through the first three splits but a rapid bottom section from Jordan Williams toppled the World Champ as he settled for third behind Loris Vergier in 2nd. The big conversation before the season kicked off was whether the talents of Jordan Williams and Jackson Goldstone could really match the established names and already at the first round, they have shown their huge potential.
The teams and riders will now make the trip to Leogang for what will be another packed week of racing, check out some of the incredible moments from the first stop of the 2023 DH World Cup below.
