Canadian National Championships – Massif du Sud

Posted: Jul 23, 2009

Source: Simon Gauthier

This year’s National Championships might have been held in a totally different place than last year, but believe me weather was at the rendez-vous. Once again Mother Nature was definitively not on our side for the weekend, indeed she finally showed some compassion for race day.

Read on for full story.

We showed up on Friday morning pretty early, set-up the booth while sipping coffees like there was no tomorrow wondering when it would start pissing. It had rained a lot on Thursday, but the weather was kinda decent and looked promising for the rest of the weekend. Wondering in the pits we saw riders already cutting down their spikes, adding mudguards to the bikes and even digging trenches just in case skies would open up again.


Practice runs went pretty well throughout the day, everyone seemed to enjoy the track since it’s mostly high speed, bit of technical and not much pedaling, which was perfect for these muddy conditions. Chairlift was quite slow to get to the top (around 20 minutes), so it’d suck if you were caught getting showered on the way up…!


We were lodging inside some super sweet condos for the weekend, offering plenty of room for everyone and even a high pressure washer outside. Once dinner was over, we washed our clothes and went pretty much straight into bed. We had the great idea to go to sleep with all windows open, so we would wake up to the birds chipping along with morning breeze… baddddd idea! I had to close the windows around 5h00am ‘cause it seemed like a freakin’ tornado was trying to sneak inside…! Anyways, this only showed us we were back to typical National's Race Weekend weather ; 15 degrees, heavy winds bending trees at 45 degrees, all that mixed with heavy showers throughout the day. Besides the weather, we were all set for some practice runs and then would follow with seedings.

After seedings were done, we closed down the booth and we were all looking forward to the same things ; warm shower, steak and pastas, then get some serious sleep to recover from spending the whole day in this cold part of Quebec.



Waking up on Sunday was way better than any of us would have thought. Yeah it had rained a bit overnight but still, less carnage than the day before. Halftime to lunch saw the sun popping out, and then skies would cover up, rain for 10 minutes and the same circus would happen again and again. Seemed like we were stuck with heavy clouds above us ‘cause when you would take chairlift to the top, you could easily see the nearest city covered by bright sunshine…sighhh.

Course was slowly starting to dry a bit when the Junior Experts made their way to the top, this means they would enjoy slightly different lines than earlier in their practice runs.


As soon as I finished packing all my things to head up top I heard the commentator’s voice yelling out loud that Pinkbike’s own Kyle Marshall had literally torn apart the track to a solid 1st place!! Too bad Trenton Zoobkoff had a severe crash during his race run, ‘cause he was definitively in the run for a serious result too.


I only had time to snap a quick picture of Kyle with his dad and it was my turn to board the chairlift so I could then witness the last top 15 Pro Men blasting out of the starting gate. Once up top you could definitively feel the high level of pressure that was going on. Everyone seemed deeply plunged into their own little worlds, mentally preparing for the most important race of the year.







I waited until the last rider/first qualifier was out of the gate to call it done, and then I would head back to the lift. It was now my turn to be plunged into my own world trying to figure out who would be crowned 2009 Canadian National Champion.


Off of the chairlift at the bottom I did not even need to read the board to figure out who was the champion, pretty much everyone was yelling ‘’LAMBERT, LAMBERT, LAMBERT !!’’ So here you go everyone, Hans Lambert is our 2009 Canadian National Champion, along with Junior Canadian National Champion Kyle Marshall. Shout outs to Andrew Mitchell for scoring a serious 5th place, and mad props to Max Horner who placed 2th in Cadet!!










Here’s a few random shots from the weekend, hope you enjoy !!







Congrats to all the racers and everyone who braved the shitty weather, it was a sickkkk weekend to remember and we’re now looking forward to a dry National Championship in Sun Peaks 2010…!

See ya’ll next time, Peace!

-Simon Gauthier
www.devinci.com