Photo Gallery: '08 Mt. St. Anne Cross Country

Wow, what a difference a day of sunshine can make. Two days ago, the course was mud soup. Then the sun came out and things got nice and tacky. Somehow the thunderstorms rained everywhere, but on the Mt. St Anne venue setting the XC crowd up for a good, tacky, racecourse. That was until about 11 pm Saturday night, when a storm decided to give the mountain a good pre-race soaking. Which made Adam Craig smile.

"They changed things back to a proper course (i.e. technical) this year and then rain the night before the race, followed by sun? Perfect," stated Craig.

And perfect it was, with Adam taking a podium spot in the men's race, but I'm getting ahead of myself, especially since the ladies were first.

The ladies race:
Not much to tell, honestly. Local heroine Marie Helene Premont knocked the crap out of everyone. Yeah, a few top names were absent, tapering for the Olympics (Hmm, tapering. Umm, last time I checked, "racing mountain bikes" is the job description. So do they taper for Worlds? Not the last time I checked. Bunch of wussies if you ask me); but the bottom line is that Marie is having a banner year and on this track, she dominates. It doesn't hurt that she can ride to the trails from her house.

Making it a race for second, which Luna's Catherine Pendrell won despite an early race charge by Gunn Rita Dahle-Flesjaa. Pendrell and Dahle-Flesjaa dicing it up for second amounted to pretty much the most excitement of the race. Lene Byberg of Specialized took third, with a couple of nifty passes early in the race, and Georgia Gould took fourth, with Gunn Rita dropping from third to fifth. Mary McConneloug ended up just off the podium with sixth place, 1:03 from a medal.

The men's race:
Cristophe Sauser suffered a nasty training crash Saturday (I wonder if he and Cedric got stitched by the same doc?), and was out of it before the race started. He's not a racer to take a "work day" off either. A lot of the top shelf male Euros are skipping their day jobs for a couple of weeks in order to rest up for the Olympics. I'm going to have to drop the "wuss" word again just for them.

One guy with Olympic gold on his neck already showed up. Julien Absalon earns the top shelf Euro blue-collar award in my book. Or is that bleu collar? Not sure. Anyway, he came out swinging and pretty much owned it from the start. Okay, Todd Wells led for the pre-lap. But after that it was the Absalon show and another battle for second, which was won by Geoff Kabush.

"I just kept it steady and when a few guys who went too hard blew up after a couple of laps, I dropped it a gear and just drilled it. I put 30 seconds into Absalon's lead, but he just had too much of a lead by that point," remarked Kabush.

Another racer to benefit by guys pushing too hard was Adam Craig. He also echoed the benefits of keeping it steady.

"I just waited until a few of those guys who can climb, but not descend, took themselves out of the race and then went for it," said Craig.

He kept it steady to the tune of a fourth place, moving up 3 spots in the final lap. GT's U23-star, Burry Stander took the spot between Geoff and Adam and Lucas Fluckiger, who took the final podium spot.