On Sunday we went along to Cwmcarn, South Wales, to see the British Cycling NPS Downhill Round Two, which is basic­ally a load of people on expens­ive bikes fling­ing themselves down a gert big track to see who can get down there fastest.

It was quite a bizarre exper­i­ence, arriv­ing and wander­ing through the car park, seeing faces you’ve only ever seen on the likes of Earthed 2 — Steve Peat, the Athertons, Cunny and The Don to name but a few. The new track drew quite a large crowd, both curious locals and mountain bike fans. Its got a fantastic “stadium section” at the bottom of the track with a whole series of vulture-friendly jumps and massive bermed corners.

We stood and watched at the penul­tim­ate corner for an hour or so and saw a couple of massive stacks — the sort that you can see going wrong from the moment they take off. One rider hit the tabletop at full speed and immed­it­ately became detached from his bike — he came down like a bag of spanners, and got a massive cheer when he got up and rode the rest of the course a couple of minutes later. A bit later we may have caused one a bit further up the course. We gave a rider a massive cheer as he came around the corner into the final section. Accordingly he went huge off of the next jump — only to crash big stylee as he hit the next berm. Sorry mate!

Our very own Alex Marshall took fourth place in the open category . He was clearly gutted to have missed out on a podium. He was knocked off at the last minute by a rider who got to re-do his run. Good effort nonethe­less. In the end Steve Peat took the elite category by just 0.6 seconds from Gee Atherton, with big bro Dan Atherton finish­ing third. In the end I think it came down to whether you did the final hip-jump or not. Gee did it, Peaty didn’t and that was all that separ­ated them. Rachael Atherton took the elite ladies.

I’ve bunged a load of photos in The Gallery — there’s Steve Peat, Gee Atherton, Oscar Saiz and god knows who else in there.