A nail-biting final in Les Gets
Following a day of qualifying on Friday on a wet and particularly treacherous track, the top thirty Elite Men came together on Saturday for the decisive run.
And it wasn’t until the very last seconds of the competition that the winner was revealed.
Very early in the session, Asa Vermette set an initial benchmark time and held the hot seat for a while. But Andreas Kolb then raised the bar considerably: the Austrian crossed the line with a time that seemed, at that point, very difficult to beat.
The riders took to the course one after the other, but no one managed to do better. Richie Rude came close, Antoine Pierron produced an impressive finish to his run, and then Jackson Goldstone finished just 0.664 seconds behind Kolb. With five riders still to go, the suspense was at its peak.
Max Alran, last to set off…and first to cross the finish line!
After several favourites have completed their runs, Andreas Kolb is still in the hot seat.
In the end, there is just one rider left to start: Max Alran.
Having already been the fastest in Thursday’s Timed Training and then setting the fastest time in Q1 on Friday, the Frenchman had shown throughout the week that he was particularly at ease on the track at Les Gets.
But he still needed to turn that speed into a win in the most important run of the weekend.
And Max Alran didn’t falter.
After a perfectly controlled run in track conditions that had continued to change, he crossed the line in 3:27.924 and clinched first place, 1.650 seconds ahead of Andreas Kolb.
The finish area erupted. Max Alran claimed his first World Cup victory in the Men’s Elite category, in France at Les Gets. A victory made all the more significant as it also brought an end to a long spell without a French win in the Men’s Elite Downhill World Cup.
