Riders tame the beast of Coed Du as storm turns race into mudbath, by Owain Bevan
An original contemporary newspaper sports report.
If you wanted a tidy, sensible bike race, Coed Du was not the place to be on Saturday. By nine in the morning the forest above Cwmafon had taken two days of rain, the car park had become a lake, and the marshal at the first gate was handing out bin bags to spectators with a cheerful warning: ‘You’ll need these. And a sense of humour.’
The Coed Du Enduro is a mountain-bike race unlike most others. Riders pedal uphill at their own pace, untimed, then race against the clock on six downhill ‘stages’ that twist through the pine trees, over roots, rocks and drop-offs that would make a goat think twice. The fastest combined time wins. In dry weather it is a test of nerve. In Saturday’s conditions it was something closer to a lottery.
A steep chute known locally as the Mangle claimed eleven riders in the first hour. I stood at its lowest corner and watched bike after bike arrive sideways. One rider slid the final twenty metres on his back, still clutching his handlebars, and stood up to a round of applause. Another lost a shoe in the mud and finished the stage with one foot bare. Nobody, as far as I could see, stopped grinning.
The crowd, several hundred strong despite the weather, lined the tape in waterproofs and wellies, ringing cowbells and shouting the name of anyone brave enough to attempt the big rock step at the bottom. Children perched on their parents’ shoulders. A man dressed as a dragon, for reasons that were never explained, banged a saucepan with a wooden spoon. The noise rolled through the trees like weather of its own.
Out of the chaos came a remarkable winner. Ffion Powell, a nineteen-year-old apprentice electrician who learned to ride on these trails, took the overall title by four seconds, beating riders with sponsors, team vans and mechanics. She had one bike, borrowed tyres and a father in the crowd holding a flask of tea. ‘I know every root in this forest,’ she said afterwards, mud plastered across her face like war paint. ‘I just pretended the rain wasn’t there.’
Her final run was the stuff of legend. Lying third with one stage left, she attacked the Mangle as if it were dry, took the inside line that everyone else had avoided, and flew off the rock step so cleanly that the dragon dropped his saucepan. Spectators at the finish heard the cheers rippling down the hill before they saw her.
Not everything went to plan. The timing system failed for forty minutes when water got into a cable, a marquee blew into a ditch, and the burger van ran out of rolls by lunchtime. Organiser Huw Llewellin, soaked to the skin, simply laughed. ‘It’s mountain biking,’ he said. ‘If you wanted predictable, you should have taken up bowls.’
By late afternoon the rain had stopped, the sun appeared briefly over the ridge and three hundred muddy riders queued for a jet wash. Ffion was among them, trophy wedged under one arm. Next year, she says, she hopes for a drought. Somehow, you suspect, she would not enjoy it nearly as much.
The Coed Du Enduro is described as chaotic and thrilling. How does the writer try to show this?
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