Gravity East Confirms 2010 Schedule

Source: Gravity East

America’s Gravity East downhill racing series has released its confirmed 2010 schedule that includes holding the first downhill race in a generation at Killington Vermont. The eye-opening news was only one of several surprises on Gravity East’s recently-released 2010 schedule that will span much of the eastern United States from America’s northern border with Canada, to the charming beauty of the Shenandoah Valley that was known as the Breadbasket of the Southern Confederacy during America’s Civil War. Full details inside,“We’ve made a lot of upgrades behind the scenes this winter,” says Gravity East's Dan McDonald. “A lot of them may seem relatively minor on the face of if, but they’ll add up to a higher-quality experience for our racers and mountains.” The standardization of the registration process and race weekend schedules, as well as the utilization of a single timing company for the series are just a few of the ‘backdoor’ improvements that Gravity East management has made behind the scenes has part of a series-wide quality-improvement program.

But the biggest change most racers will notice is the new schedule. The return of Killington, one of the iconic venues of mountain biking’s first golden age is a major coup for the series that already boasts of offering World Cup and (road race) National Championship venues for each of the season’s first two races at Massanutten and Seven Springs. On the opposite end of the schedule, the Gravity East Finals have been relocated to the rapidly expanding Vertical Earth Mountain Bike Park at Eastern Pennsylvania’s Blue Mountain. “We wanted to bring the Finals to a mountain that was more geographically centered for both our Northern and Southern racers,” says McDonald, “And since the Finals are late enough in the year that weather can become an issue on the northern mountains, it just made sense to move the Finals southward.”

As the series has grown, Gravity East has also removed aspects of its program that it felt didn’t add enough value for the racers or the sponsors. Gone is last year’s dual-slalom experiment. “We tried Dual Slalom last year,” says McDonald, “but it drained a lot of time and resources that we felt could be better spent by focusing on our bread-and-butter Downhill program.” Also gone are back-to-back race weekends, a change that McDonald was only too happy to make, “Back-to-back weekends really stretch our staff to the limit, they’re tough for our amateur racers who have to work for a living, and they don’t really benefit the pro riders either since paying for a hotel and rental car for a week is often more expensive than flying back home after the race. Getting rid of them is one of the little things we’ve done to improve the series for everyone from novice racers to world-class pros like Neko Mulally, who has confirmed that he plans to compete in as many Gravity East races this year as his World Cup program allows.”

2010 Gravity East Schedule:

April 30th (Friday) - May 1 Massanutten Resort; McGaheysville, Virginia

June 12-13 Seven Springs Resort; Seven Springs, Pennsylvania

July 3-4 Plattekill Mountain; Roxbury, New York

July 10-11 Highland Mountain Bike Park; Northfield, New Hampshire

July 31- August 1 Sugarbush Resort; Warren, Vermont