QUEEN OF THE MOUNTAINS
Denied a spot in the Olympics, but world No1 Atherton insists: I don’t need a medal to make me the best thing on two wheels
ON the endless roads of the Tour de France and on the polished pine of the Olympic velodrome, this has been a long, golden summer for British cycling. It has extended to the rocks and scrabble of the mountains of Europe and North America. Britain is also very good at downhill mountain biking and in Rachel Atherton the sport has its Laura Trott, its Chris Froome.
Downhill mountain biking is fast and dangerous, resembling downhill skiing on a bike. It takes almost two hours to walk down the one-and-ahalf-mile course on the mountainside above the pretty ski resort of La Massana in the Pyrenees.
Atherton can bike it in under five minutes.
She is 28 and grew up in Devon, the daughter of a headmaster. Her older brothers, Dan and Gee, took up mountain biking and Atherton followed them in a single-minded passion.
In the hills of North Wales, they set up house together, their lives revolving entirely around the bikes. In 2008 she and Gee won the women’s and men’s world titles on the same day. Two years ago, Gee won back the world title and Rachel failed to win back hers by 0.08 of a second, the click of a finger. She burst into tears. ‘I felt I had let the family down,’ she said. In the two years that followed she lost one race, 17 months ago.
Downhill mountain biking has two events. A series of league races, called the World Cup, began in France and ended here in Andorra yesterday. Rachel Atherton won, her 13th consecutive race victory, to complete a clean sweep of all seven World Cup events. Then there is the World Championship, a single, winner-take-all race. The venues differ but the challenge is the same: to negotiate rocks, leaps and tree stumps at speeds that can approach 40mph. Next Sunday, she will attempt to retain her world title in the Italian Alps. Unlike Tr ot t , Atherton has no Olympic medal and no calls for her to be made a dame. Downhill mountain biking is not an Olympic sport, although crosscountry mountain biking is.
Cross-country may be less of a draw than its downhill cousin — 20,000 saw Atherton win the British leg of the World Cup at Fort William — but it has been part of the Games for 20 years. Downhill, however, requires the host city to have ready access to a mountain. There are also fears the IOC would water it down for safety reasons.
‘It would have done so well in the Olympics,’ said Atherton.
‘There is such a simplicity about it. Whoever goes fastest down the mountain wins. A few years ago I was desperate to go to the Olympics but now I feel I don’t need the validation of a gold medal. Our sport is awesome without the Games.
‘Losing by less than a 10th of a second drove me on. The more I win, the more I hate not winning. For most athletes what drives them on is the fear of losing. I suppose I want to be the fastest woman on a bike.’
The Athertons joke that there are very few bones in their body they have not broken. In 2009 Atherton collided with a truck in California. Gee reset her dislocated shoulder by the roadside. When reminded of the incident, she smiles and says she has done the same for him. In May a Canadian mountain biker, Stevie Smith, was killed. ‘My mum doesn’t come to these events,’ said Atherton. ‘When she knows the result and that we are OK, she will watch it on Red Bull TV. But she won’t watch it live or answer the phone on a race weekend. Her first thought when any of her children phone is that something awful has happened.
‘So much of our sport is about knowing every aspect of the track, where every root, rock and hole is. We have head-cams on the practice runs and we will watch the film in minute detail.
‘You flash past trees, through shadow and sunlight with rocks everywhere. Today it was hard to differentiate between what was a patch of light and what was a rock.
‘It’s when you hit something you aren’t expecting that you feel yourself flying through the air.
‘You talk about the risks but when everything clicks it is almost an outof-body experience. You can feel your heart beating, your bike is working perfectly beneath you. I live for these moments.’
Backstage, with its teams of mechanics and enormous trailer trucks, mountain biking has the air of Formula One without the smell of petrol. In this cocoon, Atherton is funny, shy and polite.
Once on a bike she becomes hard, cold and ruthless. ‘I tend to keep myself apart from the other riders,’ she said. ‘I suppose winning does that to you but, in qualifying here, I finished third and everyone came over for a chat. I was back in the chasing pack. One of the girls.
‘The last race in Mont Sainte-Anne in Canada, I wanted to prove a point. The race before, in Switzerland, a British girl, Tahnee Seagrave, nearly beat me. She was 0.7 seconds behind me and when we got to Canada I got angry and aggressive and just smashed it. Off the track I am the opposite but once I get on a bike . . . ’
It’s when you hit something on the course you aren’t expecting that you feel yourself flying through the air