Harriet Harnden beat the reigning world champion and pocketed a $100,000 bonus at the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Les Gets, France, a race where fans wave chainsaws and riders launch 30 feet through the air at 40 mph.
Harnden, a British downhill racer, edged out reigning world champion Vali Holl to win the women's elite race at the French Alpine ski resort this weekend. Jordan Williams, another Brit riding for Specialized, holds the lead in the men's elite overall standings after a season that started with a broken collarbone last winter. French favorite Max Alran won the men's elite race on home soil, sending the crowd into a frenzy that Williams, a three-time World Cup winner, called unlike anything he had experienced.
The results cap a strong stretch for British talent in a sport that rarely gets mainstream attention but fills Alpine mountainsides with tens of thousands of screaming fans. And the atmosphere at Les Gets, by the riders' own accounts, borders on the surreal.
Downhill mountain biking works like an individual time trial. Riders leave a starting gate one to two minutes apart, hurl themselves down a rocky, root-choked course on bikes worth upwards of £10,000, and try to post the fastest time. A run typically lasts three to five minutes. The rider in the "hot seat", the fastest time so far, watches from the bottom as each competitor tries to knock her off.
Harnden knocked Holl off. The Sun reported that she pipped the reigning world champion to take the crown and a $100,000 bonus along with it.
She did not pretend the course was easy. Harnden told SunSport she had to talk herself out of grabbing the brakes on a fast, open section of the track:
"I came onto the motorway and was like 'don't brake, don't brake' because I'm scared."
That candor, from a woman who had just won a six-figure payday by throwing herself down a mountain at 40 mph, cuts against any notion that elite athletes in this sport are reckless adrenaline junkies with no sense of self-preservation.
Harnden told SunSport the victory still had not fully sunk in:
"You dream of this day happening, but then when it happens, you can't believe it. I feel like a little kid at Christmas."
"We're still human," she added. "We're no different to anyone else."
Jordan Williams did not win the men's race at Les Gets, Max Alran did, crossing the line to seal victory in front of a roaring home crowd. But Williams holds the bigger prize: the overall lead in the men's elite standings across the full UCI Mountain Bike World Series season.
He has earned that position the hard way. Williams ruptured his ACL during a crash in Italy two years ago and broke his collarbone last winter. For most people, either injury ends a competitive season. Williams came back from both.
He described the mental side of racing at those speeds with a bluntness that matched Harnden's honesty about fear:
"When you're hitting those speeds, not much is really going through your mind. You're just fully focused on what you're doing anywhere you're going. There's obviously the risks in this sport, but that's part of the fun of it."
On the injuries, Williams was equally direct: "At the end of the day, you've just got to get on with it and come back stronger."
Les Gets sits in the French Alps, a ski resort that transforms into a mountain bike mecca when the World Cup rolls through. The crowd atmosphere, by Williams's account, is not something you would associate with a sport most Americans have never watched.
Fans line the course from top to bottom. Some wave chainsaws. The noise carries all the way up the mountain on the ski lift that takes riders to the start gate. Williams told SunSport the sound hit him before the race even began:
"Going up in the lift, you hear it and it gets you hyped up. Coming into the finish is just crazy, I've never known noise like it."
"They're crazy, you hear it the whole way down," he said of the fans.
The UCI Mountain Bike World Series broadcasts every round on TNT Sports and HBO Max, giving the sport a distribution footprint that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Whether American audiences will ever tune in at scale remains an open question. But the product, riders launching 30 feet through the air, touching 40 mph on bikes worth more than many used cars, in front of crowds that rival European soccer for sheer volume, is not lacking for spectacle.
Two British riders just proved it is not lacking for talent, either. Harnden and Williams did not need a marketing campaign to make their case. They let the results speak, and the results, plus a $100,000 check, speak plenty.
