Vote Now in Round 2 of the UXC

Last Friday, Team Crowerace Face emerged the clear victor or Round One in RaceFace’s Ultimate XC competition. The father and son racing team garnered 46% of the first round UXC votes. Whistler natives, Eric and James Crowe, will be the first of two teams that will represent Race Face at the 2005 TransRockies event.

Now, the second round videos are online, and it’s up to you to pick a second pair of champions.

Calgary’s Troy Misseghers and Neil Grover, of Team Race Face Mountain Men, say they feed off each other’s competitive spirit for inspiration. It was this spirit that motivated these TransRockies veterans over 600km in seven days at last year’s race, where, despite a field packed with professional racers, they finished second overall, 13 seconds behind Rocky Mountain pro riders Andreas Hestler and Karl Platt! Their goal for this year’s Transrockies is to race their hearts out, be proud of what they accomplish and bring home a story they can tell their grandchildren. Team Rockin’ Pops’ Rick Sederberg and Andre H. Combs, of Arizona and Indiana, respectively, bring a mix of high-level experience and physical toughness to the UXC. Sederberg, 55 years old and a 2004 US National XC Champion, was also a member of the 2004 US Master’s World Championship Team. Combs, 46, boasts a race resume that looks like an accident report and includes a kitchen table suture job performed after his brother after a pre-race crash! Team Rockin’ Pops’ goals for the TransRockies is to have a good time, become better friends and show the world that not only can grandpas finish the race, they can kick butt! Megan Hoodspith and Sarah Goring, of Team Singletrack Sisters, have only known each other for a year, but possess a bond uncommon even among much longer relationships. These Vancouver friends share a goal of simply wanting to have fun and finish the TranRockies, but each has her own motivation for racing. Goring will begin work towards a Masters degree in the fall, and sees the TransRockies as a final adventure before the grind of schoolwork begins. Hoodspith wants to compete in memory of her father, who was killed by a drunk driver while riding his bike. Teammates David Milner and Alex Yatsina, of Alberta and Saskatchewan, met through the TransRockies online forum, and decided to race the TransRockies as a team, even though they’ve only ridden together a few times. As team Timberliners, Milner and Yatsina will be racing the TransRockies in memory of Milner’s brother, who disappeared while day hiking in British Columbia.

click the following link to vote in Round Two www.raceface.com/uxc

By now you might also be wondering why RaceFace is going through all the trouble to host this competition in the first place…You weren’t? Well, I was, so I asked RaceFace marketing man, Marshall Rutman. And this is what he told me…
MARSHALL: “Basically when we saw how successful the Ultimate Freeride Challenge was, we decided to try and do something similar on the cross country side. It actually took a couple years to find a good event that was worthy—an event that would promote the most exciting aspects of XC riding, but partnering up with the TransRockies was definitely the way to go. In the end, we wanted to create an event in which the community of riders decides the winner.”

BIKE: Most of our readers are familiar with the whole peer-judged Ultimate Freeride Championship, but why did you extend that competition format to cross country racing when so many companies are putting XC on the back burner these days?

MARSHALL: Freeriding is a very visual part of mountain biking and that’s one reason a lot of marketing dollars are being spent on it, but we also wanted to make sure that people don’t forget that we have this amazing, leading-edge cross country product line and that RaceFace, as a company, was built on the backs of XC racers and we wanted to continue to show support for that element of mountain biking and this competition is definitely part of that.

BIKE: How many people applied for the UXC slots?
MARSHALL: We don’t really give out numbers, though it’s safe to say that it’s been somewhere under a hundred applications…about the same as the UFC as time goes on. The first year we held the UFC, we got hundreds and hundreds of videos, but as time goes on, we’ve gotten less applications. At the same time, the video submissions have gotten better and better. It’s a learning curve of sorts. People are beginning to realize just how serious they have to be to win a freeride sponsorship and that limits the entries. There’s also a weeding out process with the UXC because, really, how many people can finish an event like the TransRockies, right? So every entry we received was a legitimate entry—someone who could actually finish this race and that’s a pretty small pool of riders.

BIKE: What, exactly, were you looking for when you judged the UXC submissions?

MARSHALL: In terms of the TransRockies we were really interested in finding out what motivates people to try and compete in an event this long and this difficult. Personality and motivation are key. Our goal with the UXC wasn’t simply ‘Let’s pick someone who we know is going to podium or win this thing.’ Sure, we were looking at the race resumes, but we were really asking, ‘Does the resume show this person can complete this thing.’ What I’m really asking myself is ‘What is motivating this person to try and compete in this thing.’ For the people coming on-line and following the contest, sure they want to know how the contestants have placed in the past, but what they really want to know is what the contestants are bringing to the table and what their source of motivation is—that’s what builds an emotional attachment to the riders and that’s something that’s very important to us.”