MTB DH World Champs: When & How To Watch

It’s the Downhill Mountain Bike World Championships this weekend. Here’s all you need to know about when things are happening and how to livestream it all.

Laurie Greenland performs at Fort William in2022 (pic: Bartek Wolinski, Red Bull Content Pool)

The Mountain Bike World Championships are not part of the Mountain Bike World Cup Series, and they operate to a different format, schedule and broadcast rights. Which is what this guide will hopefully help you with.

The World Champs, should anyone not know by now, are a special one-off race where the winner takes it all. ‘All’ in this instance is the title of World Champion and a set of iconic rainbow stripes, stripes that you can sport for the rest of your racing career.

Winning the World Cup Overall title is technically the more impressive achievement but… the World Champs is just extremely darned exciting! So we love it.

How to watch it? GCN+ or BBC

In terms of how you watch it live online, in the UK there are two basic options. There’s the same GCN+/Eurosport/Discovery pay-to-view outfit (à la the World Cup broadcasts) or there’s the BBC.

The BBC should have the World Champs watchable via the BBC Sport website as well as the ‘Red Button’ option in iPlayer.

GCN+ MTB World Champs page

BBC iPlayer Sport section

The World Champs schedule

Here’s a screenshot from the UCI-Tissot webpage with the daily basics:

2023 MTB (plus some other cycling disciplines) World Champs day-by-day

Here’s the more exact timetable (bear in mind that the organisers reserve the right to change the times if they need to, due to weather etc)

Thursday

4:30pm – 5:00pm, Qualifying – Junior Women
5:00pm – 6:00pm, Qualifying – Junior Men

Friday

12:00noon -12:30pm, Qualifying – Elite Women
12:30pm – 1:30pm, Qualifying – Elite Men
1:30pm – 1:45pm, Training – Junior Women
1:45pm – 2:00pm, Training – Junior Men
2:30pm, Finals – Junior Women
3:30pm, Finals – Junior Men

Saturday

12:30pm – 1:45pm, Finals – Elite Women
2:00pm – 4:30pm, Finals – Elite Men

Course preview

This rundown from James Shirley is a good ‘un…

Who will win the Downhill crowns?

The current Downhill World Champs are Vali Holl and Loic Bruni.

What are my wild predictions to be this weekend’s winners up at Fort William?

Nina Hoffman and Loris Vergier.

Who do you think we get the Rainbow Stripes? Comment below, as per 👇

When’s the XC?

Next week (link to UCI-Tissot webpage). Qualification stuff starts on Tuesday. Actual racing begins on Wednesday with the final XC event taking place on Saturday August 12th.

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Ben Haworth

Orange Switch 6er. Stif Squatcher. Schwalbe Magic Mary Purple Addix front. Maxxis DHR II 3C MaxxTerra rear. Coil fan. Ebikes are not evil. I have been a writer for nigh on 20 years, a photographer for 25 years and a mountain biker for 30 years. I have written countless magazine and website features and route guides for the UK mountain bike press, most notably for the esteemed and highly regarded Singletrackworld. Although I am a Lancastrian, I freely admit that West Yorkshire is my favourite place to ride. Rarely a week goes by without me riding and exploring the South Pennines.