Obviously its all relative, they’re all better than everyone in this thread, etc.
I covered the Olympic Test Event at Hadleigh Farm – photos and an event report – and what was really interesting was reading the vast thread on here at the time which was slagging off the whole thing.
It should be in Glentress/Afan/ByC
There’s not enough climbing
There’s nothing technical
My kid could ride that, it’s really dull
etc etc
Most people meant well but they wanted to see their idea of MTBing, not an Olympic XC course. However the courses are all man-made and they have to have a certain amount of elevation per lap, good views for spectators, a certain number of technical sections, some open bits for overtaking and a number of A/B/C lines where taking the harder A line results in time gains over taking the easier but longer C line.
As it turned out, the Test Event was very good (helped by some amazing weather) and actually a lot of people suddenly bought into it having seen pictures and videos of how tough the course was. Still pictures of a bloody great field in advance of anything being put there hadn’t helped the image. A lot of riders didn’t clear all sections and I think it became a bit of a wake-up call to some teams that they needed to work on technical riding at least as much as the fitness side of things.
And yeah – no average MTBer would have cleared everything, especially not at the speeds the XC race was doing it at!