June 19/09 11:59 am - 2010 MTB Schedule Announced

Posted by Editoress on 06/19/09
 

In the second day of meetings for the Management Committee of the UCI, the Junior Track World Championships were awarded to Pruszkow, Poland for 2011 and to Invercargill, New Zealand for 2012. The final decision by the Committee was to approve the 2010 Mountain Bike World Cup schedule.

There have been significant changes from this year to the World Cup. The opening round in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa has been dropped, and instead the season will open in Dalby Forest, Great Britain for a cross country only event. Dalby Forest is a completely new venue in the northeast (the nearest major city is York). From there it goes back to Houffalize (XC and 4X) and then the downhill begins in Maribor, Slovenia (DH and 4X), followed by Offenburg, Germany for an XC.

The cross-country takes a break for a while, with gravity events in Fort William (Scotland) and Schladming (Austria) in June, before starting up again in late July with an XC/DH combo at the 2011 Worlds venue of Champery (Switzerland), followed by a triple at the 2008 Worlds site of Val di Sole, Italy.

From here it goes to North America for the World Cup Final in Windham (New York, USA), just before the Worlds at Mont Ste Anne.

Conspicuously missing from the list are Bromont, Quebec and Madrid, Spain, and the number of events has been pared to six in each discipline. This is very likely due to the lack of a World Cup sponsor, since Nissan's agreement ends this year (and given the current state of the auto industry, it is no surprise that they are not renewing). With the dropping of Bromont, it will mean the first time in the history of the World Cup that that there will be no World Cup event in Canada.

The full schedule is here: