A damp weekend greeted riders for last weekend’s Rollercoaster and Downhill State Championships at Thredbo. With the mountain bike season drawing to a close for the winter down at Thredbo the decision was made to run the races in the rain anyway. Including the training runs on the Friday the event runs over three consecutive days. Gil and I arrived early on Saturday morning and missed what was proclaimed as a very wet and soggy training session on Friday. Many bike were still hosting a fine decoration of mud though come Saturday morning.
On Saturday the training runs for both the Rollercoaster and the Downhill continued through the morning. The first section of the Rollercoaster track needed to be closed due to an excess of mud and water, it was ankle deep in places. In the afternoon the Rollercoaster got underway. By then the rain had eased a bit. We started shooting at the top then made our way slowly down. Gil covering many of the tight switchbacks on the tracks and me shooting more out in the open. Since we were shooting more for fun we had a good play around with angles and panning shots. Not good if you want to read competitors numbers but fun for us anyways.
After heavy rain overnight all that remained was a couple of low lying clouds which burnt of quickly leaving Sunday to the blue skies. A few training runs in the morning and then straight into the downhill in the afternoon. Both Gil and I shot around the top section of mud and rock gardens. I found myself a great little spot and barely moved for the entire race.
It was the usual dominant faces that took the podiums minus the exceptions that are away for the world cup races at the moment. South Africa was held on the Saturday night while we were down there.
The full gallery of images can be found here on the OuterImage website.
