Bennett raced in his first DH race this past weekend while Utah was tearing up Grand Junction. Which, BTW, we saw the results, and great job to the Utah crowd!
The race Bennett and I (yes, me too) entered is the IXS Rookies Cup. Even though the name says Rookie, the series is designed for those riders that are younger and cannot get a UCI Junior license to race. They also let in old guys like me, but that means i have to race the 20 year olds to have this kind of fun. The series is held in Switzerland, Germany, and France. The course is considered to be the most demanding in the European IXS Cup for licensed riders and I can tell you fur sure it is a VERY hard course.
Bennett won the 11/12 class, and beat the favorite from Munich, Germany - who has led the whole series. What shocked most attendees, and got Bennett a lot of attention, is that he won by over 36 seconds in both races - a huge margin in a four minute race. He would typically sit in the Hot Seat until most of the 13/14 year group was finished.
Here is an article translated from German (which does not translate well) with the details. The second pic in the article is Bennett jumping a huge table at the end during practice:
http://tinyurl.com/bennettdh
Oh me? Yes, I did race and did pretty good. OK - I didn't get last. I was 31st out of 39 in the Men's category. If they would have had a Masters class (1980 or before), I would have gotten top 3...since thee were only three my age:) Needless to say, Bennett's times were better than mine by six seconds for the first run and fifteen seconds for the second run. I am almost embarrassed to say he crashed the second run too.
This race is a pretty big deal over here so i will try to post more articles as they become available.
