Another race and another weekend in Thredbo. After picking up the boys mate Robbie after work on Friday, we headed to Thredbo early on Saturday morning as the boys wanted to get in a good day's practice. We set up the Morewood tent and got organised, then Dad headed back to Jindy to measure up a potential job there.
Practice over and back to the Maggs' Lodge (thanks again for their hospitality) to settle in, do some bike maintenance, have showers and dinner, bit of chilling and off to bed.
Early start Sunday morning with practice open from 9am. The boys headed to the lifts after brekkie while we packed up and loaded the car so we could make a quick get away after race (as we always seem to be the last ones to leave for some reason).
Practice finished at 12pm with Thomas heading to the top not long after as he has decided to race Under 19's for the State Series this year so that he could get two runs, one qualifying and one race run. Plus there's prize money for U19's!! As he headed up for his qualifying run, Mum headed to the timing tent to help out with spotting numbers as riders came over the finish line, Dad was up the hill somewhere and Andrew and some mates also headed up the hill to do some cheering.
Thomas was the third rider out of the start gate for qualifying, after Phil & David. After all 45 riders had finished their quali runs, Thomas had the fastest time of 6:27.23, coming in 1 second ahead of Jake with 2nd fastest time.
Next it was Andrew's turn to head up the chairlift for his race run in Under 15's. Andrew was 2nd off the start, after David Maggs. It seems like an awful long time waiting for that first 7 minutes to tick by on the timing clock, finally David comes out of the trees and crosses the line in a 7:13 and before we knew it, here comes Andrew out of the trees not far behind. Andrew was screaming down towards the finish line and crossed in an extremely fast time of 6:47.89. Obviously he had a very good run as this was a PB for Thredbo for him. All 19 riders finished and Andrew was stoked, he finished in first place by a whopping 21 seconds. It made up for his terrible Nationals race run there 2 weeks before.
Finally it was Thomas' turn to head back up the lift for his race run. As if it's not stressful enough with him having one run but now we have to stress during two runs, very inconsiderate I think :) Anyway, they run the race run in reverse order so the slowest qualifier goes out first, each rider in 30 second gaps until the final 10 which they were leaving a one minute gap. The suspense was killing us as we were watching all the riders coming over the line, some in faster times than qualifying and some slower. Finally Jake came through and was 1 second quicker than quali but next thing, here comes Thomas, you could hear the crowd making shock noises as he headed down home run with us all watching the clock in amazement. Finally he crossed the line in a 6:22.13. WOW, the crowd cheered and applauded, he had won!!! After the whole race was done and dusted, it turned out that Thomas had the second fastest time of the day overall (over 220 riders). Pretty damn fine effort for a 14 year old.
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