Batten and Blevins Win Pan-American Championship Gold
Blevins secures valuable points in Olympics hunt. Batten cruises to victory on home soil.
For the final day of the 2024 Pan-American MTB Championships, we had sunny skies and no freak storms at Soldier Hollow Nordic Center in Utah’s Wasatch Mountain State Park. And, somehow, with the temperature in the high sixties, it felt unbearably hot. I’m never going to understand the weather here.
The elite men and women lined up for late afternoon races after a full day of UCI C2 SoHo Bike Fest events. The men got things going first with fifty North and South American hopefuls lining up to see if they could somehow beat unanimous race favorite, Christopher Blevins (Specialized Factory Racing).
On lap one, the contenders worked their way to the front. Blevins was joined by Leandre Bouchard (Foresco Holding Proco RL Pro Team), with Gunnar Holmgren (KMC Ridley MTB Racing Team), Adair Prieto (Canyon CLLCTV MTB), Gustavo Xavier (Specialized Brasil), Tyler Orschel (Pan-American Union Racing), Raphael Auclair (Pivot Cycles OTE), Ulan Galinski (Caloi Henrique Avancini Racing) and Jhonatan Botero (Colombia) a few seconds back.
After a lap of jockeying for position and sorting out the early pecking order, Blevins and Bouchard were joined by Prieto, who was happy to be the early pace setter at the front. This arrangement lasted until the trio passed through the tech zone and headed out to the back half of the course and the major climbing sectors.
Not far into the biggest climb on course, Blevins went to the front with Bouchard on his wheel and Prieto in third. Blevins started to ramp up the pace and soon gapped Bouchard. Prieto desperately tried to get around Bouchard to chase Blevins but was having difficulty getting through the Canadian’s neutral zone defense.
Prieto did find his way around Bouchard, but it didn’t matter in his pursuit of Blevins. Nobody was going to catch the American on a mission. Once out front with clean air, Blevins shaved eight seconds off his previous lap’s time and had ten seconds over Prieto and Bouchard.
Blevins did not let up from there, ticking off the fastest lap times of anyone in the field for the next three laps. Despite having nearly a minute and a half over Prieto by the time he crossed the line to take the win, Blevins did not let up. There was no parade lap to soak in the cheers. There wasn’t even a post-up at the end of the race. This was about points for the Olympics, and Blevins took all 150 on offer, putting him one step closer to securing a start spot in Paris.
Despite clocking a blistering 13:08 lap time for the race's final two laps, Blevins was not the fastest one-lap racer of the day. With Bouchard dropping away and Prieto comfortably in second, the battle for Bronze became the race to watch.
Holmgren, Galinski and Diego Arias Cuervo (Berria-Polimedica) were in a battle. After a tactical lap five, where the trio soft-pedaled (relatively speaking) around the track, it was on once the bell rang for the final lap. Every match left was burned as the trio flew around the track five seconds faster than Blevins’ top time.
The group came into the arena together, with Cuervo starting to sprint in earnest from 100 meters out. He had almost a bike-length gap at 50 meters when Holmgren began to wind it up. Holmgren caught Cuervo a few meters from the line and powered through to take his second bronze medal of the weekend after earning third in Friday’s short track championship
Women’s Elite XCO
In the women’s elite championship race, Kate Courtney (Scott-SRAM MTB racing Team) and Haley Batten (Specialized Factory Racing) were called first to the line, shared a pre-race shake-and-bake fist bump, and then went about ripping apart the race.
Showing a bit more restraint than we’ve seen recently, Batten was as far back as sixth in the opening moments of the race. But that positioning didn’t last long. By the time the field finished the easier first half of the course and entered the tech zone, Courtney was leading, and Batten was on her wheel. As we saw in the short track race, eight-time Brazilian national champion Karen Fernandes Olimpio (Soul Cycles) was with the two Americans.
Similar to the men’s race, the trio crossed the line to start lap
two as a cohesive unit. That cohesion disappeared quickly as Batten took the governor off the engine and blasted off the front. By the time she finished lap two, she had shaved 43 seconds off of the front group’s lap one time and had a nearly 30-second lead over Courtney. Olimpio could not match the pace of Batten or Courtney and quickly fell out of contention.
From then on, it was time trial mode for the two Americans out front. Nobody in the field would see them until they crossed the line. After that blistering second lap, Batten eased off a hair and kept it steady for the rest of the race, crossing the line to the biggest cheers of the day from the partisan Utah crowd. Batten talked after the race about how she first raced at Soldier Hollow when she was nine years old, and that was on skis.
Coming in close to three minutes after Batten, Courtney took her second silver medal of the championships. The race of the day (Batten excluded) has to go to Sandra Walter, who came from seventh place on the opening laps to third place overall. The veteran Canadian racer returned to cross country this season and can still compete for podium spots.
Full results for the 2024 Pan-American MTB Championships are here.
Men’s Elite XCO
Women’s Elite XCO
Bill you continue to bring a smile with the pithy prose (like Haley “taking the governor off”) which makes these race reports must reads. Glad the races went to chalk but going to be a bit harder to spot our folks at World Cups in those bland PanAms jerseys 🤷🏼♂️
Bill, I'm SO glad you were there to capture the stories! Thanks for the images, and for all you do in the dirt and mud.
Have you seen what some of the Euro 'crossers have been doing on tarmac (Tour de Hungary), gravel (women's), and Euro MTB Champ's??!! To be fair, I've not seen any of those races because I'm stuck here in the abandoned-by-WBD USA that Flo Bikes can't be bothered with much either. Had to be amazing though. CX Forever.