The Pietermaritzburg WC Story

The first stop on the World Cup calendar for Team SC Intense was Pietermaritzburg South Africa; what a beautiful country!

Coming into this event the team was already down 2 riders; Josh with his knee and Roman with his “bionic” ankle.  So the work load was on Miri, Flo, Lars and Faustin to fly the Intense colors.

Miri, Flo and Lars were down a week earlier for the national race round at PMB. As most of you know already, Flo knocked himself out with a broken collar bone so now we were only 3 left.

Miri and Lars had a good qualifying run on Friday securing them a place in the final; Faustin had some bad luck and just missed out.

[photo by Andres Jaramillo / flipper]

The weather was playing games with us so it was alwasy a poker with the choice of tires.  Schwalbe was always there to assist and with our new First Ride Hans Dampf tires we were spot on!  A special thanks to Mike at Schwalbe for his support and help this past race weekend!

[photo by Andres Jaramillo / flipper]

After a few more training runs with Lars, Miri was on fire with her new Intense M9.  Up till this weekend she had only done about 10 runs on her new machine and it looks like we got it pretty dialed on this first big weekend.  Miri blazed to her first ever podium  going 5th overall.  Congrats Miri from all of us!

[photo by Gary Perkin/ flipper]

Lars put in a bit of a cautious run up top losing 1-2 valuable seconds that put him just shy of a top 50 placing.  Good job Lars!

[photo by Gary Perkin/ flipper]

It looks like all the riders will be fit again for the next World Cup in Italy at the end of May.
At this time I would like to thank all our sponsors for getting us off to a great start in 2012! Thanks to; Intense Cycles, Alpine Stars, Formula, FOX, Nukeproof, Gamut USA, SRAM, Schwalbe, Scott, THE, Garmont, IBEX Sports, Panoline, Suspension Center, Turbo Spoke and the Lindenhof Spital.

[photo by Andres Jaramillo / flipper]