1) Claudio Caluori has asked the UCI about putting Rachel Atherton in the men’s field

Rachel Atherton has now won the last nine elite level women’s mountain biking races, including the last eight World Cup events and the World Championships in Vallnord. In total, she’s won a mind-numbing 28 senior World Cup races.

We’d say she’s the winningest rider of all time, but there’s a good reason Microsoft Word puts a squiggly red line under the word ‘winningest’, so we’ll just stop by saying that she’s already a downhill legend at 28 years old and has won more top level downhill events than it’s likely any of her male counterparts ever will.

So should she be racing with the men? It’s a point that Claudio Caluori raised in commentary during the downhill world cup at Cairns, saying: “Well I did ask the UCI why don’t we let her start in the men’s field but they didn’t like that idea.”

Rob Warner countered Claudio by noting: “I don’t think Rachel would [like the idea] either to be honest”. For perspective, her winning time of 3:48.566 in the women’s ranks would’ve seen Rachel finish 76^th in the men’s field.

The point Claudio raised next was probably more valid, noting that he had suggested it only as a “new challenge”, before adding that another “new challenge for her could be to have a perfect season and win every race.”

3) Joshua Button has definitely not been media trained

One of our favourite things about the live coverage of the UCI Downhill World Cup is that it’s exactly that – live. And mountain bikers tend to be a fairly unpredictable lot.

When you’re watching a post-match football interview for example, you can pretty much predict what the dude in front of the mic is going to say before he’s said it, because there’s probably a media counsellor at the club who has been paid a disgustingly large salary to turn him into a robot and teach him some lines.

When it’s a mountain biker, you can guarantee that’s not the case, and the results are always entertaining. Cue the first four words Joshua Button said to the camera after being asked how he felt about finishing in the top ten and sitting on the podium so long: “fifth is fucking crazy”.

Yes Joshua!

The Aussie then proceeded to give a technical evaluation of his run to the camera, which sounded a little something like this: “my top split was good, the middle was shit and the bottom two were good”. Cue the wonderful irony of Rob Warner having to apologise in his commentary for someone else saying something that’s a little too racy.

3) The sky is the limit now for Loic Bruni

So 2015 World Champion Loic Bruni has now become 2015 World Champion and 2016 World Cup winner Loic Bruni, at long long last.

With the monkey off his back and his first World Cup win under his belt – imagine for a moment how difficult it would actually be to win a downhill race with a monkey on your back – the pressure is now largely off Loic for the rest of the season and you can bet he’ll be even more confident next time he rolls up to the starting gate.

It looks like the big occasions sometimes get to Bruni. At World Champs in Vallnord he told how he pitched up not expecting much, and then won. At Lourdes, racing in the World Cup in the rainbow stripes, the pressure was on and he crashed out when he was leading Gwin.

4) Pedalling can be fun too, kids

Who knew so much excitement could come from a stretch of track requiring a bunch of professionals on downhill bikes to do a shitload of pedalling?

We saw how tiring the final sprint was when Claudio Caluori dropped his course preview and could barely breathe afterwards, but it wasn’t until the finals got going that the fans really got to see the excitement this would generate.

The rock section was gnarly, the jumps were entertaining, but watching Troy Brosnan, the last rider down the mountain, go into the final stretch 0.184 ahead of leader Loic Bruni and then drop half a second to hand the Frenchman his debut win was the moment of the day.

So much of the day was won and lost on the leaderboard because of those climactic pedal strokes, and it had us on the edge of our seats to the point where we were basically squatting.

5) Some weird stuff happened on Florent Payet and Amaury Pierron’s plane to Oz

Speaking during Florent Payet’s more than entertaining run down the Cairns course, Rob Warner told a rather bizarre story, or rumour if you will, circling around about French duo Payet and Pierron’s flight over to Australia:

“They took some sleeping tablets to help them deal with the long flight here,” he said. “Woke up – and i’m not quite sure of the ins and outs of it – but it effected them quite seriously.

“They ended up going and helping themselves to a couple of first class seats I believe and the police were waiting for them when they got here. That’s the rumour. That’s been confirmed by quite a few people.”

How utterly bizarre. It didn’t seem to affect Florent’s performance on the first half of the course anyway. He was on one… But then he did crash out. Related? We’ll leave that up to you.

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