World Cup Round 2 – France La Bresse (My First World Cup)

Ok so my first World Cup has been and I am writing this on my journey to Andorra for the next round, it’s going to be sick!

After a 6 hour sleep from Calais, Dad had driven all the way through the night to get to La Bresse.

We did the usual walk of the course a good few times before Fridays practise. I knew where the course went before I rode it which was a big help. However, it was quite an easy course to learn. It was all open apart from one wooded section that was less than 10 seconds long. Basically the track was like Molfre on steroids! It had very steep switch backs on grass with huge rocks etc. I mean you even jumped over a house... here are a few pictures to show you what it was like;

Fridays practise went well and the course was just so much fun to ride! The weather was messing about a lot but spikes were the ones for sure! I got about 8 runs in I think with breaks and that. I thought to myself I am going to take a few full runs down in the morning and when it comes to qualifying I will just go down at a comfortable pace and see where I come.

Saturday came around and that’s what I did really. I had 3 runs in the morning and the course was drying up well. I kept to spikes but everyone changed to high rollers. I was used to how they were in the dry and didn’t think it was bad to have them on. It was the right choice for me.

I went up for qualifying and to be honest I was happy with my run down. I stayed smooth and got down without a worry and it was blooming great fun with the amount of people shouting and cheering you on! Here is a picture of the bottom section;

I didn’t make qualifying which was annoying by 6 seconds. I was gob smacked to see how close qualifying was... I was 19 seconds off of winning the overall qualifying yet 6 seconds off of getting top 80. That was a real eye opener to me for sure!

I had just learnt that the level of world cup’s was way beyond how I practised. I was just cruising down safely and having a good ride each run. You need to get everything as fast as you can in practise which kind of sounds obvious but even qualifying is that close. For example from 11th to 42nd there was just 4 seconds difference. It definitely didn’t feel beyond me to do it but I was going to have to change the way I rode next week for sure.

It was amazing to see Steve Peat win both qualifying and the race the next day. Amazing stuff!

Thanks to Last, DMR, Rezurgence, Lifestyle Ford, 2026 distribution, Funn, Bell, Thor, KMC, Nike 6.0, Mojo suspension, and Shimano.