How's that for a rock shute? Photo: Doug Shannon
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The Megavalanche is Bex Hopkins all time favourite race
The first time I did the Megavalanche was in 1994 (yes I am old) and I had no idea what it was about, no Brits were there and me and my friend turned up with limited French language and bike skills. But we felt great cos we had our new hardtail bikes. That may sound a bit dumb but we'd never seen a full susser back then, well not in real life anyway. We had 1" travel suspension forks and we thought we were tricked out and raring to go.
Even if we could have understood the rules and warnings of death/injury on the entry form we would never had imagined such an event was legal. Only the French would think of this. When we got off the top cable car and and almost died with fear. We promptly went to the back of the 800 rider line-up and rode down last, hanging on for our lives.
For those who ski or snowboard you may understand quite how steep the glacier is at Alp D'Huez, it's a respectable black run (the steepest classified run in France). When you fall off, which is often, the snow is not nice and soft or regular in any way, it's hard or slushy or has ravines in it and you cannot stand up for a moment. It was dictated by gravity that we would slide down on our backsides dragging, or being pulled by, our bikes.
The rocky section after that was worse, not sure how, the big steps and drops were overpowering our UK XC-trained arms, legs and lack of suspension travel. But we picked our way down the course clinging on to our V-brake levers (Oh, yes I was sensible enough too have upgraded them before the trip). The river crossing pretty much finished me off, the ravine had a massively deep and super fast river and three big rocks to jump across whilst carrying your bike...it was terrifying. Needless to say this didn't feature in the MegAvalanche again. If you fell in you were dead!
I think we made it half way to the finish and stopped for lunch at a bar....a few glasses of wine sorted out my nerves and we rode the rest of the course the next day!
I vowed to go back and finish it! And that I did, in 1997, 1999 and 2000, finishing each one in the top 250 men (no women's category back then and all 1000 riders started in one go....don't need to explain how scarey the glacier was with 1000 psychos riding down it). I did a 1hr 15 minutes and a 4th place in women category as my best ride, beating a load of British guys and puking on the finish line!! It's a race every self-respecting mountain biker must complete!!
If you need some Alpine riding practice then why not join us next summer for the
DirtGirls training camps in Morzine? We'll be announcing the new dates soon.
Visit www.avalanchecup.com for more information.
