Queenstown Bike Festival Wrap Up
During the 10 days of the Festival we had guests arrive in Queenstown from all over the world and it gave us and Queenstown a chance to showcase the biking, the scenery, the action and all the activities that the region has to offer.
The 3rd Outside Sports Juice Lubes Super D
The 3rd Outside Sports Juice Lubes Super D was once again a success this year, with almost 200 entrants doing as many laps as possible on the fantastic and challenging course in Queenstown Bike Park set by local Jarna McKenzie.
The diverse field represented a great mix of pros and social riders from all over New Zealand and the world, with France particularly well represented! As well as top NZ riders Sam Blenkinsop, Cameron Cole, Matt Scoles and Rosara Joseph to name a few, we had the Commencal Super Team as well as the Hutchinson UR / Polygon team from France.
The female contingent was supported by the fantastic and lovely all women’s biking organisation Revolve who sent quite a few crews from Wellington (nice costumes Cowgirls).
Ethan Glover nailed the Open Male Category with the fastest time, closely followed by Jamie Nicol and Rupert Chapman – they all beat out an impressive 14 laps on the course today and were ranked on the time taken overall.
Watch the video and read the full report.
The Vertigo Bikes Downhill Dirtmasters
The Vertigo Bikes Downhill Dirtmasters race was nail bitingly close after the seeding runs, with the top 5 open male riders all completing the course within 1.5 seconds of each other. The top 5 in the open male category have all placed in a Downhill World Cup, which demonstrates the high quality riders the high adrenaline event is attracting.
The fastest rider got to keep the hot seat warm and drink beer at the finish line until someone else ran a faster time. Kurt Lancaster from Nelson (entered into the Master’s 30+ category) impressively held the hot seat (and drank a fair amount of compulsory beer) for a while with his time of 3:15:20 only being smashed when the top 10 open male riders came through.
Cameron Cole from Christchurch took the podium with 3:02:72, closely followed by Wyn Masters from Nelson at 03:02:93, last year’s winner Sam Blenkinsop was third with 3:02:97 and Fabien Cousinie (3:04:03) and Guillaume Cauvin (3:04:20) from France coming 4th and 5th.
Watch the video and read more.
The Teva Slopestyle!
This year, the popular Teva Slopestyle event achieved silver status on the FMB World Tour circuit.
The international Teva team, Sam Pilgrim from the UK, Kurt Sorge and Sam Dueck from Canada and Chad Kagy with Benny Phillips from Australia widened the field this year and it pushed expectations to the max.
Based on last year’s, the course, built in 4 days from scratch in a car park close to the centre of Queenstown, was bigger and therefore faster with an extra feature at the end. Riders rolled in onto a kicker from the top of a high scaffold through a 15ft x 15ft drop straight to a quarter pipe and wall. The scaffold was a storey higher than last year, meaning riders will go faster and higher. From the wall, riders steped up to a wooden structure called a fruit bowl which generates a lot of speed and then step down to build up to the money booter – the mother of all jumps on the course where prizes are won and crazy tricks are thrown down!
The last feature – a quarter pipe to flat bank – gave riders one more opportunity to bust out more tricks.
The crowd of thousands (between 4 – 5,000) filled the Ballarat Street Car Park and was certainly going wild and amping up the competitors to try some crazy tricks out there.
Watch the video and read the full report.
New World Tour de Wakatipu 2013
Around 650 people gathered together at Milbrook in the chilly morning to set themselves the goal of competing in the Tour de Wakatipu, whether they were here to break a record in the elite category or here just to survive and get through with not breaking a leg!
This race is a little less steep that the other events in the festival, but it can get just as fast at the sharp end!
Loaded up on bananas and apples donated by New World Wakatipu, everyone was looking forward to the wonderful goodies waiting for them at Chard Farm such as food stalls, wine tasting, soulful tunes and as MC James Clark summed it up .. some sunshiney goodness!
Riders and runners also had the exclusive opportunity to ride on the ‘other side of the Kawarau river’ through Cone Peak Station, which is only open once a year only to New World Tour de Wakatipu entrants. The Merrell 12.5km run was introduced to the event for the first time this year.
Read the full report here and watch the video.
We have had great support from a large number of sponsors for each of the different events in the Festival, and a big thanks to all those for believing in us – just the third Qtn Bike Fest and it has firmly established itself on the world stage already. We also depended a lot on a great crew of volunteers without which many of the events would have been impossible to run. We thank every one of them.
To read reports from all the Queenstown Bike Festival events click here.
