Video: Big Jumps & Lots of Technical Sections - A First Look at the Brand New XC World Cup Course in Araxá
Here is a lap on the course on the bike
And this is a track walk.
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I was asking about why there weren't any roots in the middle of the jungle for the last course, and someone said something about 'that's just how it is there', and I was like wtf, that makes no sense? This clearly shows that they can build the track without covering everything up and make it properly technical in places.
But yeah, they should've kept more natural features over there.
Old-school XC racing was much less technical and the field was a mix of "real" mountain bikers and riders who could succeed purely on their engines, some of whom with technical skills no better than those of an average recreational rider. As you can see in the videos above, the skills of modern World Cup XC racers range from above average to way above average.
Modern courses are striking a good balance of being challenging enough to create time gaps due to differences in skill without being excessively dangerous.
Examples:
• Pauline Ferrand-Prévot may lose a couple dozen seconds per lap on a particularly technical course, which sometimes costs her a win, while sometimes she climbs well enough to compensate.
- Same was true for Loana Lecomte, but she's made impressive improvements in her technical skills.
- Ondřej Cink consistently loses a few places due to weaker technical skills.
• In the 2018 World Championships, Annika Langvad appeared to have the edge on Kate Courtney in fitness, but Courtney would make up the deficit in the technical sections, eventually forcing an error from Langvad that led to Courtney's win.
• Jolanda Neff was the only(?) woman to ride the A line in a dusty year at Val di Sole and was gaining about three to eight seconds per lap in just one corner over B line and C line riders.
• Titouan Carod and Jolanda Neff unquestionably won the Mont-Sainte-Anne XCO in 2022 due to their exceptional skills in the wet. Fitness made them contenders; skills made them winners.
Additional viewing:
• Araxa course practice. Looks DH practice will all the line testing and bikes getting squashed!
• Course preview for Val di Sole. Notice how Carter Woods, a particularly strong technical rider, pulls away from Jens Schuermans on every technical section. The aforementioned A/B/C choice is at 9:25.
@R-M-R: What do you mean by old school XC? Going back to the start of world wide competition (Grundig), courses had lots of natural hiking trails with off-camber greasy or marbly janky corners, logs to hop, snarls of roots (like Araxa), creek beds etc. The most important skills required were observed trials type skills (trials or speed trials was often part of stage racing). A low power rider with above average trials and cornering skills could finish mid-pack in a World Cup, and if you had both power and skills (like Tomac) you could dominate. Now you need both power and skills to not get lapped and pulled in the first three laps.
I've ridden several of the courses and volunteered at races, including one that was considered among the most technical at the time, and I was fine on it with my fixed-height seatpost, 50 mm of front travel, rim brakes, 71° head-tube angle, 100 mm stem, and 1.9" tires with 70a compound rubber at 30 PSI. Some of the courses were mostly 4WD access roads and buff walking paths, with a few sections of moderate rocks and roots.
When attending races, there were several riders who were hopeless on technical sections; they just got off and ran as if it was a cyclocross race - for them, it pretty much was. And they were still competitive. Definitely cost them a few places, but there were several courses on which you could be competitive with little ability to actually mountain bike. To your point: yes, there was a time when exceptionally skilled riders could make up for mediocre (by elite standards) fitness. I maintain this is because the average skill level was poor at that time, while now every top-ten rider is a little to a lot more skilled than the riders we're likely to meet on our local trails. Also, bikes were so crap back then that it took a pretty good pilot to be highly competent and crashes were very common, so there was good reason to focus only on fitness. I remember several top pros saying they rarely rode their mountain bikes outside of mountain bike races because the quality of training was higher on the road. Of course road training is still an important part of a mountain biker's program, but not to that extent.
Another important difference is that the technical parts of old-school courses weren't especially fast. We would bounce - or run - along stretches of janky singletrack barely faster than trail running speeds. Modern courses require hitting much larger terrain features at much higher speeds.