Holden Jones

Solid support helps this young rider toward his big results

In August, Holden Jones’s late season was looking good. The firstyear under-23 cross country racer won the Canada Cup series overall in the elite category. Later, at the world championships in Mont-sainte-anne, his race began well. He started in 44th position and worked himself up to 20th position by the start of the second lap. Unfortunately, a midrace crash forced him to abandon. With the cross country season over, Jones headed back to the University of British Columbia to continue his engineering studies.

How long have you been racing?

I have been racing local toonie and kid races since I was in Grade 3. I’ve raced the Canada Cup series for five years, since I was under-17. In my first year as a junior, in 2017, I travelled to Europe for the first time. Later that year, I went to Australia for world championships.

How did you gravitate to cross country racing? Squamish isn’t necessarily known for its XC scene. The riding there isn’t necessarily XC, but it supports a really great training environment with long climbs, so you can fit in almost a road ride on the fire roads heading up to the trails. In my first couple of years racing,

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Holden Jones, 2019 world championships, Mont-sainte-anne

I started by doing both XC and DH, pretty much equally. At some point, I realized I was doing a bit better in the XC races. When I was about 15 or 16, I figured it was time to make a choice and went for XC.

Who has helped get you here, to this point in your career?

Mike Charuk, a coach with Team Squamish, a local youth mountain biking club. He used to be the Cycling BC high-performance coach. When I first joined Team Squamish at 13 or 14, I came out to all the group rides. Once I was old enough to race the Canada Cup events, he invited me to come out to the races because he organized the projects. He really got me into the high-performance side of things and has been my coach for the past five years.

Mont-sainte-anne was my third world championships. My parents have come to all three – Australia, Switzerland and now Quebec – which is pretty wicked. My extended family is incredibly supportive. They’ll follow my racing on the live streams.

What about friends back home?

I’m a little bit of an odd one out. All of my friends are biking friends, but they’re more into enduro or downhill. I just follow them on my little XC bike. They’re super stoked on it all, too.

From a fan’s perspective at the side of the course at worlds, the cheering gets louder when a Canadian rides past, but from your perspective, is it just louder the whole time?

In Lenzerheide last year, there were so many people attending. But this year, in Canada, you could really feel so much more energy from the crowd. There’s no way you’re just sitting up on one of the climbs when you have all of those people shouting your name.

What’s it like being on Pendrel Racing and having Catharine Pendrel and Keith Wilson as resources?

It’s so amazing. My coach Mike has told me so much about Catharine and Keith. At every race I was at, even before I was on Pendrel Racing, Mike would tell me to go talk to them because they have so much knowledge. To be on the team that they’ve put together and interact with them so often is really wonderful.

There’s a lot of things you can read or hear, but if you just read it in a book or an online resource, it’s not the same as hearing it from someone who has accomplished so much. You hear how important rest is, but when you have someone like Catharine explain how important a rest week would be after three weeks of hard racing, it feels a lot more real.