Thredbo Downhill National Report by Jordan Prochyra

Getting up for work at 5 am seems easy compared to the rude 3:30 am alarm that awaits the Wednesday morning before a national round weekend. After meeting speedlight teammate Carl Pickersgill at the airport, it was a 3 hour flight over to Melbourne to pick up the rental van. Next a 6 hour slog to Thredbo and after a rain soaked drive, we couldn’t wait to get out on our bikes the following day!

After racing Thredbo last year, We were building speed pretty quickly. With a lot of moisture still in the ground we were railing the lower turns and berms in no time! We called it a day after 6 runs and jumped in the frigid waters of the river just below our cabin for a makeshift ice bath!

Friday was the start of official practise and we started the day with a track walk. After finding a few sneaky lines and with a few runs in the books in the morning we heading back to the cabin for some lunch. We headed up for 3 more runs and I was really happy with the pace I was riding at, nailed a couple of technical rock gaps and felt like I had everything fairly dialled! After a swim in the river and 8 or so runs it had been a big day and called for an early night!

Saturday was much the same as Friday, building speed in a few sections and working on hitting my lines at speed it was an awesome day up on the hill riding with mates. The kind of day that reminds me why I love riding and racing at this level! Saturday evening was bike prep time, throwing a new set of tyres on and going over the whole bike.

Sunday. Race day. After 3 days of practise it’s all down to that one run on Sunday afternoon. It was a super short practise session so I only managed to get one run in to get a feel again.

Around 11 I headed up for my seeding run. It was a scrappy ordeal with me not really finding any flow until the right down the bottom. Still I ended up seeding in 8th with a 4.47 only 1.4 seconds off 4th place. I was happy enough with that and knew I had a good few seconds in me come finals time. It was a 3 hour wait until our final runs so we heading up to the bakery for fresh salad rolls, then dropped the legs into the river to cool down a bit, with the sun having a bit of bite it was a great call! Over the weekend I had bent 2 sets of pedals and each time the thread on the crank was becoming weaker. Of course it was the only thing I didn’t check on my bike before I headed up for my run. I got to the top to find my pedal basically sitting in the crank with no thread left with nothere was so way to tighten it! I didn’t know what I was going to do! With 10 minutes to go until my run time I managed to stop an under 19’s kid riding past and persuaded him to let me borrow his crank arm for my run! Luckily he agreed and after a quick crank change I was back in the runnings. Albeit with one crank 10 mm longer than the other! My  race run was pretty smooth overall, i didn’t make too many mistakes apart from blowing a few corners and loosing a bit of momentum. I crossed the line with a 4.44.64 and into the hotseat with 7 riders left to go! My giant bikes Australia team mate tim eaton finally knocked me out of the hot seat going 0.4 seconds quicker, but it didn’t matter to me, I had finally managed to make it onto a national podium in 5th! It has been a goal for couple of years now so I was stoked to finally make it a reality!

Thanks to speedlite cycles and giant bikes Australia for all the support so far this year! For now it’s time to put the head down with training and focus on national champs in 6 weeks time!

Pic: Sean Lee