Any ideas?

Various from the looks of things.

Mix of hardtaols and sus

A softail as well. The commentator mentioned that the race is for 29ers, but I believe some of them are running 650Bs?

Haven’t seen any Cube bikes yesterday or today. Noticed even Merida and KTM bikes, any reason of no Cubes in front?

Looks like 2 X 11 gears

Looks like 2 X 11 gears

Leaders are on 1×12
(or looks like it anyway)

Just the usual UCI XCO rules as at world cups. Riders will be on their usual team bikes, I’m surprised by the number of full sus bikes being used, thought it would be more of a hardtail course. I’ve spied 650b, 29er, 1x, 2x and dropper posts.

Scott Spark took Gold, Specialized Epic Silver….

Yesterday they said the majority of the women were on HT 29ers, today I saw a lot of FS bikes.

It would be interesting to ride that course, TV always does a good job at flattening them.

Has anyone ridden the London track? That’s open to the public now isn’t it?

Lots of punctures today.

I was surprised by the punctures. Surely they’d be running tubeless, those guys would have fairly high tyre pressure and there didn’t appear to be much in the way of sharp rocks to tear sidewalls, so why the flats??

The speed chubby, the speed.

Didn’t see any Girvin Flexi stems….

Deore throughout……sensible choice

Carbon frames, carbon wheels, a lot of XTR & eagle for the higher ranked riders.

Surely they’d be running tubeless,

Was mainly tubs in the 2012 MTB race..

[url=https://flic.kr/p/cPKtKQ]Dugast Tubs Olympic Mountain Bike Race[/url] by Ben Freeman, on Flickr

Nino is defo on tubeless AFAIK maxxis don’t make mtb tubs

I was surprised by the punctures. Surely they’d be running tubeless, those guys would have fairly high tyre pressure and there didn’t appear to be much in the way of sharp rocks to tear sidewalls, so why the flats??

They would be running tubeless, it was very slimy mud after the 16hrs of over night rain so I guess riders were dropping pressure to try and find grip. The rock were clearly a lot sharper than people gave them credit for.

Nino usually races Dugast tubs and being as he was on clinchers, I suspect it was a choice to prevent flats rather than gain advantage.

@tthew, what makes you think they run high pressure? XC riders are generally running 18-22psi i believe. Combine that with flimsy race specific casing and you get pinchflats quite easily.

Nino seems to have moved to maxxis, has been spotted at previous races running what appears to be a prototype aspen.