Bicycling

© Gary Perkin

The 'African MTB kid' as he calls himself on Twitter, Burry Stander blogs about his fantastic bronze medal at the MTB World Champs in Canada. This was Burry's first race in the elite category after winning the U23 last year and gives us a great insight into his race. Well done Burry!

We have edited his blog, adding capital letters and punctuation to make it easier to read..

Bronzin' it...

It wasn't long ago that I stood next to the track in amazement staring at the pro riders flying by at the World Champs... This year's World Championships has been a very exciting proposition for me ever since winning the u/23 World Championships in Canberra last year. I set two optimistic goals for the 2010 season; I wanted to win a medal at both the Marathon World Championships and the Cross Country (XCO) World Champs a month later.

Last month I managed to achieve my first goal, however I knew I wasn't going to be as lucky at the XCO Worlds with that sort of form. So I went home, got re-focused and set about making it happen. After last week's disappointment in Windham, I knew I had some good shape and the motivation was sky high.

I have raced at Mont St Anne for a couple of years now and I think they did a great job of the course for this year's Worlds. The loop was shortened somewhat which meant we would do the two big climbs more often than before. The course also had the sweetest bridges I've ever ridden over. It was like a skatepark out there!

The Specialized team did an awesome job again this week. Our bikes had to be race ready not once, but twice this week as we had a team relay on Wednesday. I had a pretty solid lap in some traffic as SA had a third row call up. The rest of our SA team did a good job and we just missed the top 10 and ended 11th.

For bike setup this week, I went for a single ring in the front - a 34 tooth rotor ring mounted to a Specialized carbon road spider did the job perfectly. Again, I was aboard my 2010 Stumpjumper 29er. I ran a new prototype mud tyre on the front dubbed "winston" by the team. On the rear I had my fast rolling renegade setup. Sram hooked us up with some new XX World Cup edition black box brake last week which rounded off the package superbly. The bike weighed in at 8.2kg and handled the rough and technical track like a dream.

In the morning of the race it had rained quite heavily but it was drying out a little whilst the women were fighting it out on the course. We started at 2pm and the clouds were threatening. I had a great jump of the line and got through the first turn in the lead. I held onto the the front until the first climb where I settled into the lead group before dropping into the first single track. We did two start laps which comprised half of the full lap with the most climbing. After the two laps I was in third trailing by around 10 sec. I had settled into my own pace on a track that offered very little drafting. With riders positions swapping for most of the race I just tried to stay relaxed as I knew it was going to be very tough at the end. By midway through the full laps of which we did 6 I hit the front of the race again. On my heels though was Jose Hermida from Spain and Jaroslav Kulhavy from the Czech Republic. It was indeed a tough battle at the end in which I had to settle for a second bronze medal of the year! It was an incredible feeling to end the season by achieving the goal I wanted most!

Thanks to everyone for the support, I look forward to some time off now before racing Roc d'Azur in October...

Ciao
Burry

For more blogs from Burry, head to http://www.burrystander.co.za/