2023 Enduro National Championships - Saturday

Words and photos: Matt Rousu

The 2023 Enduro National Championships started with juniors, E-bikers and adaptive riders on Saturday 14th October. It was a cool, blustery, damp and typical Mornington Peninsula day but thanks to the hard work of the Red Hill Riders crew the trails were running pretty mint. The occasional muddy section was to be expected with all the rain that has fallen here in the last couple of weeks.

Swipe throught the gallery above for more photos.

As is typical of high-end Enduro events the riders all left the pits in waves so the day was spread out massively. E-bike racers left from 8:30am yet the last U17 and adaptive racers didn’t leave the bottom until after 10:30am. This worked really well this year with next to no log-jams of riders waiting out in the cold before each stage, I think the biggest group I saw was no more than 30 people.

The conditions out on the trails were super varied, from windblown almost dusty corners out in the open to axle deep ruts of icky mud in the dark forests. It seemed almost no rider had a clean ride of all stages (except Kirrily Gates from U13 Girls, she’s one to keep an eye on in the future).

The U17 Men category had a super close battle between Cooper Northey and Connor Wright, Northey would take the win by just 2 seconds after they traded stage wins again and again, the only blemish being a small crash by Wright on the slippery roots on stage 1 Pins and Needles. A fantastic battle between these two well known juniors! Oliver Colthup would take the bronze medal on the day.

The U17 Women would also have 3 seperate stage winners but Elleni Turkovic put in a stellar run down the technical stage 5 of Deadwoods to take an unassailable lead over Lacey Adams and Hannah Elliott.

It was awesome to see the U15 and U13 classes stacked in both boys and girls. They seemed to be the most eager too, I saw multiple kids sprinting up the liaisons so they could get to the next stage faster. The E-bike category didn’t really suffer problems on the liaisons though, even the 2 uphill power stages didn’t make much difference in the overall results. They were so ahead of their start times that by stage 4 the marshals weren’t in place to open the stage. The average time that they were out on the hill was just a bit over 3 hours total, compared to the U17s who were out there for nearly 5 hours. It’s almost impossible to keep in front of them to capture the race…

The highlight for me today was the adaptive racing. I’ve been lucky enough to see a fair amount of adaptive racing over the last 5 years and this was by far the best I’ve seen. The crew of 8 riders seemed to be having a great time racing together, at the top there were cheers and at the bottom of each stage was a stoked group of riders with grins and “I almost lost it there” stories! The riders were divided into 2 categories (basically one category with 2 wheeled bikes and one category with three wheeled bikes). Patrick Best would take the win in Adaptive2 and Luke Searl would take the win in Adaptive3.

Tomorrow it’s the big show. Elites, U21 and all masters categories hit the park, with the forecast looking even more grim than today, it’s going to be the best all around athletes who rise to the top of the podium!

Catch all the results from AusCycling.