We love getting personal curiosity requests, as they give us a chance to dive into the archives to learn and share more.
Last week we wrote about the race events Blackcomb Mountain held when it entered the mountain bike scene, including the Can-Am Challenge. Ken Austin, who competed in the race, recently reached out to see if we had photographs and to see if his memory of the event was correct. He gave us quite a story!
The second annual Labatt’s Can-Am Challenge in 1989 took place from Aug. 18 to 20, and saw approximately 350 riders compete for $10,000 in cash and prizes.
Austin rode for Ridley’s Cycle in Calgary and participated in all four races. The cross-country race started off the weekend on the Friday, with dual slalom on the Saturday, and the uphill and descent on the Sunday.
According to Austin, he went “too hard having fun the day before [the cross-country race], then drinking only water, with no fuel mix.” Envy kicked in when he saw the Ritchey Team had a fuel station for its riders, “as the rest of us were dumb enough to be only on water, no support, no special fuels.”
The next day was not much better with the dual slalom, but Austin’s teammate Pete Lawrence did well.
Austin smashed the uphill climb and finished in sixth place, but “never having climbed that hard for that long, [Austin] spent the entire lunch break at the gondola station trying to not get a massive butt cheek cramp, gently stretching. The glutes were just twitching to lock up.”
So far for the weekend, the weather had been perfect for each race, until the clouds rolled in on Sunday afternoon, just in time for the Kamikaze Descent.
“Right away, we were in the clouds, couldn’t see my handlebars for quite a stretch,” Austin recalls. “There were braver fools crying in the ditches with broken collarbones and such. In the dense fog, as I crawled along, Greg Herbold came flying by, as if it was a clear day! He must have pre-rode the course quite a bit, days before, to have it memorized.”
Several Whistler riders placed well in the top three of many categories. Cindy Devine beat California’s Cindy Whitehead in the Women’s Pro. Whitehead captured the top spot the year prior.
The Can-Am Challenge was another success with strong attendance. Though the first two years did attract many pros, some did not see a point in competing, as these races were not sanctioned and did not count towards points for being on a national team. According to the Whistler Question, in 1990 there was a rule change for the world championships, where each country could only have five riders, which resulted in fewer American riders participating in the Can-Am Challenge than usual.
A year later, the Can-Am Challenge was renamed to the Blackcomb Challenge. It was the fourth and final stop in the Canada Cup Points Series. The Canadian Cycling Association created the series to establish a national ranking system for riders when choosing a national MTB team.
The Blackcomb Challenge occurred again the next year, but in 1993 there was instead the Labatt/BRC Mountain Bike Race weekend, which in previous years was a series that took place over the course of the summer.
We always love hearing more stories. Have one to tell, or have items or photographs we can preserve in our collections? Email us at [email protected].
