WTF is happening at tomorrow’s MTB World Series DH?

Don’t get me wrong – there is huge potential there but there were many, many bugs/ issues that got quite annoying. If they can sort it out it’ll be great:

I had a few drop outs watching on Eurosport. They kept cutting away to people in the crowd or interviews in the middle of the race. The video quality seemed much worse than red bull. It felt like the commentators couldn’t see the race – not picking up on the live timing splits. The live timing screens were unreliable. Cedric isn’t a good commentator.

Given the GCN+ search is utterly broken, and the View All on race replays in in random order. Any tips how to find an actual race you want?

I thought it was ok really, not great but not awful. Commentators do need to settle in but then I don’t get the Rob W worship either, he’d long ago resorted to shouting “LOOK AT THE TIME!”.

I only saw the Semi finals as I haven’t subscribed yet. Thought it was decent.

I don’t think Rob was technically good at commentating but he really conveyed the excitement of the racing and the close split times, back and forth etc.

That was surely missing from the naf YouTube official highlights, given the magnitude of what was achieved in both finals.

Looking forward to them improving, especially more attention to the splits, and to another great season of racing. Seems to get better every year.

I’d be happy to see the end of protected riders. Get there on current form or not at all. Puncture or mechanical, bad luck but could happen to anyone.

I’m OK with protected riders for the qualification but with there only being 5 protected men and 3 protected women going from semis to finals that just seems fundamentally unfair.

Edit:  I may be talking bollocks (for a change). As far as I can tell from the results sheet there were 4 protected women and 9 protected men in the semi-finals results sheet.

Anyone know how the rules actually work going from the semis to the finals?

Cast (well, the other button “AirPlay”) from an iPhone to a Roku stick. Good pic etc. Awaiting a Roku GCN+ app which they say is coming.
Seems good value, but of course it was ace that Red Bull was free and with a pretty good app on most smart tvs. Let’s hope Warner Bros. put a lot back into the sport.

It was indeed a long day to watch women’s and then men’s.
There was a tech issue for me. If you paused to make a cuppa etc it might jump back to the start and it takes a while shuffling to get back to the right spot.

@BruceWee
p = protected for qualifiers
P = protected for semis

Protected riders who fall short of the cutoff (not totally sure about dnf) are additional to the qualified riders for each round, so nobody gets bumped off the bottom of the list like they used to.

Yep, it got revised not so long ago.
For the men there are now 10, for the women there are 4.

So got the GCN+ sub in the end as bt sport wasn’t working. Paid GCN still needed to be cast from a laptop to the tele. Picture was sometimes rubbish/unwatchable, sometimes ok. From what I saw it looked like great racing.  But this faff is a right hassle and barely worth it.

Honestly the Discovery+ was completely spot on… no issues, no drop-outs, no problems at all.

If you got your discovery+ through amazon prime, there was no commentary during the races, just the sounds of bikes,crowds etc.

Oh and – slow handclap for GMBN racing for putting the f*cking results in the titles of their youtube videos a matter of minutes after the racing, and then pushing it out as notifications and emails, completely giving the game away. Morons.

Yep, it got revised not so long ago.
For the men there are now 10, for the women there are 4.

Not so bad then, but I still think it give a hugely unfair advantage and should be ditched.

I guess the other thing you could do was only protect the riders who had a mathematical chance of winning the overall.  Doesn’t work very well at the beginning of the season, obviously.

I didn’t think it was terrible, but they do need to do better. The commentary barely seemed to register that Bruni was up 1/2 a second at the first split, nearly even at the 2nd, up again by half a second, then lost it again, instead they just seamed to have some pre written “waneresque” comments that they were desperate to throw in rather than just describing the race in their own style.

I agree with this, I’m watching a race which is timed, it felt like awful analogies or funny comments trumped actually commenting on the splits! and not even adding any commentary to it, watching the womens, Rach was 2 seconds-ish up into the woods and lost nearly all of it, when Camile went she was only a second back, but if she had a good woods section she could catch or overtake Rach but this wasnt mentioned.

Never thought I’d miss the virtual straight or segment comparisson from Red Bulls coverage but would have been handy for the top 3.

I noticed something annoying, I get D+ free with Sky, you can then log into D+ on any other device you can get the app, so I have the app on my Apple TV, with the Apple TV when starting the broadcast I could watch from the start or watch live, when I was evicted to another room of the house on the sky box I could only watch live, but when I went back to the Apple TV in the other room but options were still present.