It’s Thursday. I’m at my desk in Waterloo. The rain’s finally stopped, but the trails haven’t dried, so rather than bust out for a ride, John Riley and I are reviewing a presentation when the phone rings. It’s Ross Schnell,
“Uh, Browne – I have some bad news. So my hip is kind of broken.”
“Ross, what’s ‘kind of broken’?”
“Well, it’s broken.”
Ross Schnell. If you haven’t heard the name, you’ve obviously been paying more attention to World Cup races than the burgeoning category of “all mountain enduro.” Here in the United States, the most notable race is the Downieville Classic, which gave itself the prestigious title of “All Mountain World Championship,” the same year that Ross Schnell dethroned 2-time champion Mark Weir, besting the course record by a total of three minutes. That single race catapulted him out of the ranks of “fast guys” and into the league of “the next best thing.”
Since then, he’s been written about over and over again, from his local Grand Junction Sentinel to VeloNews to Bike Magazine.
So how does the next best thing go from being the subject of every major publication’s lead article to broken and battered? Simple – Metabief.
No, Metabief isn’t the next sports supplement or diet fad, it’s a French Enduro that was a key element in raising the global profile of Ross Schnell and increasing his exposure to the wide variety of racing that exists around the world. Drawing high profile participants like Nicolas Vouilloz, Rémy Absalon and Wade Simmons, the race format unlike anything that exists here in the States quite yet.
Rewarding the all-around mountain biker rather than the specialist, the race takes in the Alps along the French/Swiss border near Lucerne, Switzerland. The terrain is highly technical, and race participants are allowed no pre-riding of any of the three tracks. Racing takes place over two days, and all riders log multiple timed runs on each run. As expected, times improve as racers learn the course. As Ross said it, “the first day is just pure DH stuff, but the second day is lots of pedaling.”
And here is the key element—just like Downieville, riders have to ride the same bike on each day. The only component you can change is tires.
Here’s Ross’s account of how it all went down:
The race is really unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It was insane. It was my first time doing anything like this, and the race venue was hard enough to find. I was traveling alone in a rental car, and everyone else had all this support and had been there for days ahead of time. I knew about the “no course pre-riding,” but what I didn’t realize is that guys like Nico Vouilloz would go out ahead of time and walk the tracks with a video camera. Then they’d go back and watch the video over and over and memorize everything. I’ll definitely be doing that next time.
The Remedy was definitely the best bike for the course, as everyone was running six-inch bikes, but what killed me was everyone had all this support. The top guys had tents and mechanics and food laid out, whereas all I had was myself—it was hard enough to find food, let alone wash my bike and get it prepped for the next run!
There were 10 different stages, and the first three took place on the same track. I got eighth on the first run, fourth on the second and fifth on the third, so I felt like my learning curve wasn’t too bad. It was all really technical track; lots of roots, lots of steep descents, I really picked the wrong gear because my 36t chainring had me spinning out where I could’ve been on the gas more.
photo by Sam PeridyBy the fourth run, I was feeling great. I felt like I really had it dialed. Every corner was like a thousand-watt sprint, and this run was even steeper than the last, dropping through a deep wooded forest. After the woods, it was high-speed through the meadows with falling off-camber terrain; to be quite honest it was really intimidating to hit this at maximum speed. When I got to the grass, my rear wheel hit a rut and it drifted into the wet grass. The whole bike got out from under me and when I fell, my hip just slammed into the ground. My legs were all tangled in the bike, but I got up quickly and somehow managed to place fifth, just seven seconds off stage winner Nico Vouilloz. The thing that kills me is that my run was so smooth and fast up to that point, I just know I would’ve won if I hadn’t crashed.
photo by Sam PeridyAfter that, I knew I had bruised myself but I didn’t know to what extent. I still pinned it for round five and six, getting fifth and sixth again which put me at sixth overall.
Since Sunday was better for the fit guys like me, I knew it was the day I’d beat everyone by twenty seconds. I had seen the trail and there was a fair amout of uphill involved, but once I got out there, I knew something was seriously wrong. I didn’t even finish stage 7 because it hurt so bad.
photo by Sam PeridyAfter that, I left the event and drove to Italy to meet up with the SRAM guys for their XX launch. That was some serious pain – holing my leg down just to push the clutch in. It took me about 5 days to get home, where I immediately got a CT scan where they found that yes indeed, I had broken my hip.
“Fractured off the greater trochanter of the femur,” to be exact.
So what does this mean for Ross? It means he’ll be logging miles on his road bike, trying to tolerate the pain, and trying to find a way to keep fit enough to defend his title as All-Mountain World Champion at the 2009 Downieville Classic.
