Shooting at a Cycle MTB Race!

twowheeledmonkey (54)in #cycling • 6 years ago

Last Sunday I volunteered as video crew for an amateur MTB XC race in Delhi. The race was set in the Aravallis, which is the oldest mountain range in India. Grandparent to the Himalayas, it has been reduced to the point where it is now an anthill in comparison. This thorny, rocky range borders the Thar Desert and makes for an interesting place to ride an MTB, even if not an ideal place.

Being an amateur race the prize as always is a dozen bananas! And the competition ranged from twelve year olds to people on the other side of fifty and everything in between!

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The course started with a sandy patch leading to a sharp short climb before going down into a singletrack. The flowy singletrack then opened up to a 3 km wide open descent, where a lot of time could be made up by the technically sound. The track then double backed up a rocky 2.5 km climb, which altered between sharp and gradual slopes. The rocks ended at the sandy patch where the rider went through the same rigmarole another 5 times. The 6 lap race was calculated to be 36 km, which turned out to be wrong, instead it was a whopping 50 km leaving all the racers hitting a wall at the 40km mark with their pacing having gone haywire!

The racers were not the only amateurs as the video crew were noobs as well. I was handling a gimble for the very first time and my friend a drone. Between the two of us we gave the riders several false starts as we didn't capture the perfect footage. Finally with drone and gimble in place the race started. As the racers went round the bend I crashed through the brush to take a shortcut to catch them again before they descended. As the lead pack approached I was surprised to see the leader, the race favourite was trailing by a few metres. One look at his face though and it was obvious that he was biding his time.

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The pack kicked up dust and dirt as they whizzed past me and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the youngest were not the slowest. As the last of the troupe went past me I rushed to my bike and went in the opposite direction of the circuit to catch the racers once again before they could finish the first loop.

Incorrectly assuming that I had sufficient time before the race leaders would find me, I lazily took the camera out of my backpack, only to be left scrambling to capture the flying boys and girls. Gradually I made my way against the tide, shooting and watching these adrenaline charged riders giving it their best. The teens were still holding their own against the oldies.

A rider covered in dust slowed down and asked me for a toolkit, he had crashed and had worked his handlebar loose. So like Spiderman I tried to shoot with one hand and protect the innocent with the other. Or at the very least aid the unfortunate faller.

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I spent the same amount of time to circumnavigate the circuit once, as the racers took to do it six times! But not all were fast freddies. Some of them were real slow pokes as one incident made clear. I had just pulled out a sandwich from my backpack (yes, the luxury of not racing!) when I saw these two riders approaching. The sandwich was put aside as I armed myself with the camera and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, I got so bored that I took out my sandwich again, finished it off and then eventually saw the riders go past me!

At the finish line we sent the winner back a few hundred metres and told him to race to the finish again, as we hadn't got our gimble and drone set up in time! Fortunately our intervention didn't change the results as second and third were battling it out a considerable distance away, while some of the other strong riders suffered mechanicals. The downside of racing MTB, you never know when your next breakdown will catch you out!

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