There are, indeed, strange things done in the midnight sun. You nailed it, Mr. Service.
Funny costumes, bizarre team names and a bit of twilight nudity marked another wild 24 Hours of Light Mountain Bike Festival over the weekend.
About 170 participants took part in the often-wacky 14th annual event hosted by Yukon’s Contagious Mountain Bike Club from noon Saturday to noon Sunday at the Biathlon Yukon range on Grey Mountain Road.
“I tried to eat light, had mostly shakes,” said Whitehorse’s Nicholas Filteau. “I talked to one of the guys who won it a couple years ago and he gave me a couple of tricks like bringing some cream for your butt and things like that. Because after a couple hours, it starts to hurt.”
Filteau rode quite a bit more than a couple hours. The 27-year-old completed 16 laps of the 11.8-kilometre course to take first place in the solo men’s category. That’s about 188.8 kilometres over the 24 hours.
Whitehorse’s Victor Munoz placed second with also 16 laps - but behind Filteau - and Whitehorse’s Karl Blattmann came third with 14 laps.
“It was a great race - a bit harder than I expected,” said Filteau. “Until midnight was the hardest part, then the night laps are pretty good for me. It’s kind of relaxed and there’s not too many people on the course. When the sun comes out you get a second wind and I had way more energy to finish strong.”
Whitehorse’s Meagan Wilson made it two in a row over the weekend. Wilson, 31, defended her solo women’s title, completing 15 laps - four less than last year.
“It was nice to not do as many laps,” said Wilson, a past Yukon mountain bike champ. “It was fun ... Next year I’m going on a team. Next year I’m going to sleep more.”
Vancouver’s Kay Kahill rode to second with 10 laps and Whitehorse’s Jenny George to third with 10. (Kahill finished her 10 first to break the tie.)
The oddly named team Girls Weekend, which was made up of four guys, didn’t expect to ride naked for bonus laps. But Whitehorse’s Kevin MacGillivray, Rob McConnell, Doug Terry and North Vancouver’s Paul Bradstone did it for the win.
“There were nude laps done because we had to, not because we wanted to,” said Terry. “Because the competition was doing them, we decided we should all participate.”
“Our competition said they weren’t going to do nude laps and then they started doing them, so we decided to have some nude laps,” said MacGillivray.
Girls Weekend completed 37 laps to win the four-person category. The winning eight-person team also completed 37 laps, but Girls Weekend did them faster to win the overall title on Sunday.
“We just put ourselves together for this race. This is the first time the three of us have done it - Rob has done a number of times,” said MacGillivray. “It was excellent. It’s a well-organized event and people were collegial and helpful. We had a mechanical breakdown of one of our bikes and people offered to help us out.”
Whitehorse’s The Return of the Retreating Invisible Goblins Within gobbled up the eight-person category with 37 laps. The new team included Nadele Flynn, Verena Koenig, Anthony Bier, Isabel Beauregard and Matt Schenck.
“We didn’t have any great plan, we just thought we’d ride and have fun,” said Schenck. “I think we all pulled our weight. Maybe Anthony did the most (laps).”
Schenck and Konig had one of the more unfortunate laps in the race. The two was on a naked tandem-bike lap when the chain broke at the farthest point away from the biathlon range.
“That was a bit of a bummer because we had to run next to the bike for the rest of the way,” said Schenck. “We were faster than I thought - we were at an hour, 12.”
Konig, however, did set the fastest lap for females at 38:40. Davey Mitchell had the fastest lap for males at 31:54.
Team Boreale 2 - Luanda Pronovost, Sonjaa Schmidt, Wynne Anderson Lindsay, Victor Thibault and Gallagher D’abramo - won the eight-hour youth category with 17 laps.
Schmidt laid down the fastest youth female lap at 19:15 while Nichollis Schmidt, of the second place Boreale 1 team, had the fastest youth male lap at 16:15.
North Vancouver’s Loose Moose team of Regan Kohlhardt and Davey Mitchell claimed first in the two-person category with 25 laps.
An Anchorage team, Free Duke, which included two Olympians, won the award for most laps by a team, not including bonus naked laps. They completed 32 “pure” laps for first.
Contact Tom Patrick at
tomp@yukon-news.com