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

Riders seemed to be generally positive about it in the pinkbike aftermath video. Everybody has a lot to learn on the whole system yet.

Don’t know why tahnee was protected though as she never raced last season!

I could have this completely wrong, but I’ve never had mainstream media have articles of a world cup pop up in my feeds before.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cycling/65867362

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/jun/11/rachel-atherton-wins-uci-downhill-world-cup-cycling?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

This seems positive for the sport.

As for Tahnee being protected, I think concussion is now treated differently, as it should be so as not to pressure riders returning too soon.  Don’t forget EWS took this seriously before most cycling federations so can see why the new organisation would protect Tahnee, and Pompom when she’s ready to return.

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.

The XC coverage was once again excellent. The speed of the race is far more suited to drones following through yes than DH. They still lost the riders occasionally when using the birds eye view.
Ric has gelled with Bart better than with CG, who still hasn’t quite adjusted to commentating in English and alongside someone else.

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’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 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!”.

Actually the GCN+ app on AppleTV seems to have had an update and its now unstable 🙁

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.

The bikes seemed to look slow to me in parts (a lot of parts) there’s no way it’s slow. They are gods of speed.
Seems crazy

Camera positions perhaps for long duration pans. Very long lenses compress perspective.

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?

I subscribed to GCN plus to watch , worked fine casting from the phone to the TV . I watched the men’s semi then the women’s finals before going to bed . Woke up Sunday , went for a ride then watched the replay of the men’s finals so for me it was spread out over 2 days . I’m quite into the racing , listen to pre and post race downtime  podcasts etc etc but I’m not sure i would sit there and watch the whole thing semis and straight into finals .  Just feels like quite a long time to spend in front of the TV on a weekend . I wonder if the semi finals will only be for a year or so as it seemed ESO / discovery seem very keen on the reduced field for the live show and once the novelty has worn off i can see most people only tuning in for the final .

I thought the broadcast was fine , I thought id miss warner more but it was actually Elliott Jackson that I thought was the biggest loss . He is friends with a lot of the racers and was able to give insights into some behind the scenes stuff . I don’t think Cedric Gracia was necessarily bad but I’m not sure he told me anything i couldn’t work out for myself .

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.

It was quite a long broadcast yes… it seemed to go on forever… but in a very good way 🙂

We watched on Disco+ and it worked perfectly well. No issues, plenty of camera angles, plenty of track coverage.

Both commentators showed plenty of knowledge, the Irish lad i was half expecting to be more of a commentator than someone full of knowledge as i thought he only did the Enduro stuff, but he seemed pretty clued up.

As much as it’s a shame Warner has gone, he’s just a commentator, no more no less… The real interest is the riders… Which was as always brilliant to watch.

@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.

p = protected for qualifiers
P = protected for semis

Sure, but my question is how many riders are protected going from semis to finals.

From this:

https://www.pinkbike.com/news/the-ucis-major-rule-changes-for-the-2023-dh-world-cup.html

Protected riders to the final are:
1. riders ranked in the top 3 women elite and top 5 men elite of the final UCI World
Cup standings of the previous season

But then according to this:

https://www.pinkbike.com/news/semi-final-results-from-the-lenzerheide-dh-world-cup-2023.html

There were 4 big P women and 9 big P men.

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

Rachel is only doing a few, good short interview with her on Wyn’s track walk

I saw that… wonder if anything’s changed since then?

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.

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.

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.

I tried the discovery+, paid direct to them as I also wanted to watch Le Mans this weekend.

App on phone, App on smart TV, and even (joy of joys!) through a browser on the computer – and it worked flawlessly.

Really annoying, as I wanted to hate it, but it actually worked really well. And the search, highlights, channel guide etc are all really easy to use. I guess thats goodbye to another 7 quid a month for the foreseeable then!

As for Cedric – even Rob wasnt that good when he first started.

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.

TBF to them, RedBull used to do exactly the same thing on their website as well.

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.

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.

Red Bull screwed it up once (at least) but that was presumably by accident whereas this was presumably on purpose to drive subscription.

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.