Pietermaritzburg Predictions

Hmmmm – rain in PMB – could change things a little.
My money’s on Minnar if it’s significantly wet – local knowledge.

oof

Brook Macdonalds crash

Danny Hart and his whips: By probably a stupidly small amount, would not be as aerodynamic while pulling said whip? Therefore is he kept the bike straight in the air would he gain some 0.000001s of a second? If this is bollocks please say!

Graves. Ex 4x, got a carbon bike and dropper post. Go Yeti.

This race is won by the strong who can pedal best. Look at the quali’ splits, Troy belted to the first split beating all names (I think) but the power needs to be laid down soon after cloud 9 so I’m guessing that Minnar, Peaty, Gee and Gwin are all in the top 5. Smith is just getting better and better though…

I can’t wait. 😀

Bloody hell – British rider in with a chance in the XC

British Cycling might consider teaching their riders how to mend a puncture though, maybe she’s waiting for a bloke to come along and fix it for her

Er, Annie didn’t puncture, her chain bounced off the ring and jammed. her result given the slight mechanical was great, looking good for the season ahead…

its a pedaly track , greg minnaar

I’ve only just worked out that “GST” on the Red Bull site actually means GMT. I’m going by the countdown ticker on the Freecaster Homepage.

So 12:15pm start I think.

Ha – I just pressed play on the freecaster stream and I can see soneone’s desktop.
He was in gmail.
Now he’s exited, I can see “this copy of Windows is not genuine” written at the bottom of the screen 🙂

So 12:15pm start I think

1.15pm gmt start according to Red Bull tv homepage.

I reckon Jared Graves could surprise a few people. He can pedal as well/better than anyone else and he’s got the bike skills. If he’s going to seriously challenge in DH, you’d think Pietermaritzburg would be where he would do it.

oops

Ooh, if you skip ahead on the Freecaster feed, they’re commenting on a computer game. Wicked awesome!

Starcraft 2 and Halo – how exciting!

Red bull now shows a countdown – 22mins – so it was 12:15.
I don’t know ho hard it was to get this info – ridiculous!

FWIW, Pinkbike has the times nice and simple on their website. They know their audience (concussed downhillers)

I can’t get it on the Redbull website (servers overloaded), but the iPhone and iPad apps are working.

Stream eventually worked, but it’s a monumental screw-up.
lol @ “live” 😉

so far it’s only been replay of women’s final, some commentary of the mens final but the video of the women’s 🙄 and Rob+Nige filling in.
Maybe they’ll fix it before the top 3 go down?

Stream eventually worked, but it’s a monumental screw-up.
lol @ “live”

Been fine here

Really good picture for me on the Pinkbike site, but not much footage from the upper part of the track. Time jumps to about 3 minutes for every rider after the first split.

Danny Hart’s just crashed…

Warner’s keeping it pretty tame though, shame

“Went down faster than a french breast implant” had me wincing to be fair 😆 Warner’s best when he’s not forcing it I reckon, he was trying a wee bit hard last year.

(absolutely perfect streaming here btw)

Great race.

I got first and second right so I reckon I should get the bubbly.

🙂

Had to laugh at Warner saying “the Gravy train is rolling” during Graves’ run.

Worked fine for me on Freecaster (oh the irony) in the end. A glitch just as Gee was coming up to the line but that was it.

Fantastic race. Average coverage.
Shame that DH1 series didn’t happen – I’d love more than anything to get wider start gaps of the top few riders. It’s important that we get to see just what it is the riders have to face over a full 5mins at some point.
So many times, your just really watching the splits to get any idea of the speed of a run.
Luckily that bottom section proved decisive, so we got to see some of that today.

iPad stream worked well for me, thoroughly enjoyed it, Minnar was awesome, Rob Warner cracked me up with his French breast implant jibe!

Yeah, I used the RedBull app on my iPhone (beamed ‘magically’ to my TV 8) ) which worked perfectly.

There were a few hitches during the women’s commentary, I was concerned that it would all go tits up for the men but it smoothed out. It’s amazing that we have this sort of coverage.

Super, how did you beam it from your iPhone to the tv?

I don’t think that the. Coverage has been any better than Freecaster. We only got 30 men! Loads of time missing from each run too. I appreciate that you need lots of cameras to do a good job but c’mon, Redbull take over and you can’t even tell!

The race itself was good, just feel bad for wor Danny!

I knew Minnar would see the top 3 so good for him on home soil!!!

I thought Gee’s race kit looked nice.

Is there a STW mini-league?

Super, how did you beam it from your iPhone to the tv?

Beamed from iPhone to an Apple TV using AirPlay I should think.

it was a bit weird them just missing out a huge chunk of the track, surely they couldve spared one more camera to film the giant tables.

i was impressed with the quality for a live stream though.

Aye, apart from the more stable feed that could’ve been Freecaster. Which is not a bad thing.

Reason for no cameras in the middle- comes down to the rider gaps as I mentioned up the page, you can’t show a rider’s full run as the next man is on track before the last man is finished. So rather than camera’ing the whole track and only using a small amount of the footage, you miss out the bit that everyone agrees is crap.

Minaar is in another league! ,having said that,the top five looked v handy indeed,but,ya know what they say,’if ya not fast,ya last,!’.

Beamed from iPhone to an Apple TV using AirPlay I should think.

Yep. Say what you will about Apple’s walled garden and the fact that you need to jailbreak to do a lot of the good stuff, Airplay is massively cool. You press a button and the feed instantly goes from your phone onto to the TV. It feels like we’re actually in the future we were promised.

Beamed from iPhone to an Apple TV using AirPlay I should think.

Witched Trickery!!

Damn, and I had the massive inconvenience of having to plug a cable from my TV into a netbook to achieve the same result.

Cables are ghey.

surely they couldve spared one more camera to film the giant tables.

That’s what I thought.

I’m sure there was talk of them having twice the amount of cameras that Freecaster used to, but it dodn’t feel like it.

Is there a STW mini-league?

Yes. See here for PIN and stuff.
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/dirt-fantasy-dh-stw-league

I’m sure there was talk of them having twice the amount of cameras that Freecaster used to, but it dodn’t feel like it.

There were definitely a couple of times last year and the year before when they clearly only had 4 or 5 on-track cameras though. It was pretty limiting.
I didn’t count the cameras this time, but it definitely felt like they covered the bits that we saw with more of them.
As mentioned above, it’s the start intervals that determine how much we can see. Longer intervals between riders would be better, but then the coverage has to be longer, there’s more chance of weather differences effecting the result, etc.

Either that or they could broadcast the show live-ish instead of live and just stretch time.

I realised after the race I’d been thinking freecaster had more cams but I think that was just because I was comparing with the world champs, which they covered in much more detail (and charged for)