Having landed in Barcelona on Wednesday, then driven 1000km across Spain, our first event was in Badajoz over the weekend.
There was a model event on Friday afternoon just to test the bikes out, followed by a sprint and long on Saturday, and a medium on Sunday.
The sprint and medium were WMS events for Rachel and Liam, all 3 events were Spanish champs for the locals, and points from all 3 events counted towards the 'Extremadura cup' as the best riders of the weekend.
WMS is 5 year age groups, but most events will be 10 year, so Rachel is competing in W40 events, but having her WMS points calculated only against other W45 riders. Similarly some of the people beating Liam in M50 may actually be accruing M55 WMS points, and therefore actually be in a different competition.
M12 is a standard grade in MTBO, and Sherlock has unfortunately just graduated out of it, so is racing M15 at a lot of events this year - including this one - so really has his work cut out for him. For example Sherlock's sprint was 5k... The same length as Nixon's long! While Sherlock had to face 15k for his long.
The Saturday morning sprint was across the road from the model event on a very similar map. Liam decided to avoid having to answer questions about why control 9 had taken over 7 minutes when it was so close to 8, by missing 10 out completely ;-( Nixon smashed his sprint, and Rachel managed a 2nd, while Sherlock got round his in about 6th.
For the afternoon long, we moved to an army training ground, which was great fun, with lots of parallel tracks, and big open areas where the tankies obviously practised their congregating and burnouts. Rachel managed to win her long convincingly, with Nixie 2nd, and the boys 6th or so.
The medium on Sunday was on another military area with a complex track network and sober vicious climbs/ descents surrounding a central stony hill/ quarry feature. Liam and Rachel's courses both started with a 5k road loop round the outside of the main features, which was handy for getting into the map. Rachel took another solid win, with Nixon in 2nd, losing all of his time before reaching the first control add he couldn't get his map onto the board, and more single digit results for Liam and Sherlock.
So a better start for Rachel than Liam, with either 2 wins or a 1 & a 2 to open her score, plus taking the Extremadura cup for the weekend. Nix lost out on his cup because of the mapboard issue, so will have a bigger one for the next event, and the other boys need to buck their ideas up.
