PORT ANGELES — Get some. Get ’er done. Go get it.
No matter the pronouncement. Riders at Fluidride Cup downhill mountain bike races needed little encouragement zipping down Dry Hill this weekend.
They call it gravity riding for a reason: Other than a highly developed sense of balance and a healthy disregard for one’s, well, health, riders need only to point their bike down the course and let Newton’s law take its course.
Oh, and they’d better be able to find the right “line” down a zig-zagging course complete with jumps, craggy technical sections and sharp turns.
None did a better job of that during Sunday’s final races than Santa Cruz, Calif., professional Curtis Keene (aka “the American Dream”).
The World Cup downhill professional beat a Pro Men field of 73 riders to claim the second leg of the Fluidride Cup at Dry Hill, a mountain biker’s paradise located just west of Port Angeles on Green Crow and state Department of Natural Resources timber land.
His time of 2 minutes, 39.37 seconds was nearly three seconds faster than the next racer, second-place finisher Luke Strobel of Seattle (2:42.28).
Strobel and the next two racers were all within three-tenths of a second of each other.
‘It was good times’
“As always, it was good times,” said Keene, who has been a downhill professional for six years and is sponsored by Specialized/SRAM. “I ran well, [and] we got lucky with the weather. It was perfect . . . a perfect weekend.”
Keene took home $1,000 for his first-place finish, while Katie Holden won $500 for taking the pro women event in 3:05.47.
No doubt the money will come in handy for Keene, who will have to jet off to Europe today for a couple of World Cup events in the next few weeks.
“I had a good run my final run and took home the win, which is hard to do because these guys are so fast,” Keene said. “[The course] was really good.
Just ‘game on’
“You just come down the strip about 150 feet, hook a right, and then it’s kind of just ‘Game on.’ You can just coast. It’s got a bit of everything . . . a lot of sweeping turns, some good tech sections, some good jumps. So the course is really fun. I think everyone would agree, too. That’s why everyone comes back.”
This weekend’s races drew the largest turnout in the event’s brief two-year history.
The boost could be partially attributed to the fact that this weekend’s Fluidride Cup competition was also adopted as the opening leg of the Gravity Racing Tour, making it a part of a national pro circuit that includes races in Colorado, New York and New Mexico.
400 riders
Nearly 400 riders came out for the weekend, including 73 pro men and 11 pro women.
Olympic Dirt Society member Scott Tucker, one of several event organizers, said that approximately 100 riders came from California alone.
And many more spectators lined the trails ringing cowbells, banging on makeshift drums, hollering at passing riders and, if the occasion arose, lifting fallen riders back onto their bikes.
“To have this many people and have it go as smooth as it did, it’s wonderful,” Tucker said. “[The track] was perfect. Everybody loves the course, the organization and the town. It’s a perfect little venue.”
Readying the trails
Dirt Society members spent the weeks leading up to the races readying the trails.
While they didn’t add any new trails to the race, they “enhanced” them, clearing off rocks, raking dirt to make a smooth course and marking each route with tape.
“We did a lot of hiking during the last few weeks,” Tucker said.
They will have to get back at it again soon enough. The next Dry Hill Fluidride event is set for Aug. 22-24.
