The sun came out after lunch on Friday and the top riders were straight up the hill for their timed practice runs. With strong winds forecast for Saturday, there is a chance (and we’ll know at 11am) that qualification will be postponed until Sunday morning, so riders were taking every chance they could get, with some riders going non-stop to get their lines right on the rapidly changing course.
Manon launches into the sunshineElite rider practice was blessed with good weatherBrendog looking fast on Bangers BermSam Dale on the fast upper bit of the course
We’ve made a gallery of some of Chipps’ shots from timed practice, so if you can’t be here at Fort William, you can see some of the riders and bikes that are being thrown down the mountain (sometimes quite literally).
With 22 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)
