In 2017, Kate Courtney had a season to remember. It was her last year racing in the U23 category, and in the first four World Cup races, she won twice and was second twice. Locked in a season-long battle with Sina Frei and Evie Richards, the penultimate race took place at Mont-Sainte-Anne in August.
A rainy day saturated the course with mud, leaving a course that is already littered with venous root beds and mossy rock slabs even more treacherously slick. Amid the chaos, Courtney had the overall title on her mind.
“I remember it was very critical in winning the overall,” Courtney recalled to Escape recently. “When you come down to those last few races you really have to deliver in order to secure overall titles.”
The American sailed through the precarious conditions, pulling off the win with a margin of more than two minutes, ticking another box on her way to the overall series victory.
The Québécois ski area is a familiar name to mountain bike fans both old and new. It’s been around since the early days of the sport, back when racers competed in both cross-country and downhill on the same hardtail bike. And while many other once-hallowed venues – Mammoth Mountain, California; Cairns, Australia; Pietermaritzberg, South Africa – have come and gone, Mont-Sainte-Anne is still around today, hosting the season finale of the UCI Mountain Bike World Series this weekend.
Patrice Drouin, who helped organize the first-ever UCI World Mountain Bike Championships in Durango, Colorado in 1990, was also the pioneer who (along with Gestev business partner and fellow Mountain Bike Hall of Famer Chantal LaChance) brought World Cup racing to Québec the next year.
At that time, there was no unified global circuit for the sport; North America and specifically the U.S. was its competitive center – the National Off-Road Bicycle Association’s National Championship Series was a kind of de facto top-level circuit – and the UCI wanted to internationalize the sport. Drouin and Lachance leapt at the opportunity to bring the World Cup to Canada. But even Drouin didn’t anticipate what Mont-Sainte-Anne became, telling Freehub magazine, “We never expected that this event will just be at Mont-Sainte-Anne all of these years.”
But it has been. Since that first 1991 edition, Mont-Sainte-Anne has hosted 29 World Cups and three World Championship races, more than any other venue in the sport. Although it’s not as old as road cycling’s most legendary races, Mont-Sainte-Anne still draws comparisons to the Classics – 1996 World XC Champion and current Scott-SRAM team manager Thomas Frischknecht called it “on par with Paris-Roubaix in road cycling, as in to win here is something more than any other World Cup race.”
But as Drouin noted to Freehub, there is no perfect venue in mountain biking. And even other high-quality – iconic, arguably – locations have peaked and faded. So what’s the special sauce that has given “MSA” such longevity?
‘Old school natural riding … with new-school technical demands’
As Courtney’s seven-year-old experience demonstrates, the course can make or break careers and leave a lasting imprint on riders’ minds. A win there can stamp your name in the history books. A bad experience – perhaps a crash on the infamous Beatrice rock garden – can do the same.
There are many features of a legendary venue, but according to all the riders I surveyed, one of the most important is the track. Courtney told me that MSA offers a good mix between old-school and new-school course design.
“I think it’s like true mountain biking,” the Scott-SRAM racer and 2018 World Champion said. “It’s very technical, but the technicality comes from really natural features. So it’s kind of something that combines that more old-school natural riding with the more new-school, very technical demands. And so I think that makes it a really unique challenge.”
Olympic silver medalist Haley Batten also used the words “true mountain biking.” She praised the technical features, and added that they are challenging but also well-designed. The course is hard but not clunky, leading to an exciting race dynamic.
“I don’t think people realize how many different elements go into building a track,” Batten, who placed third here in 2022, told Escape. “Like it needs to be technical but it needs to be the right type of technical so you can race well in a group with it. There has to be good climbs, fun sections that flow really nicely and transition well. I feel like that course has a lot of that.”
Batten’s thoughts on the MSA course are a reflection at a time when there are tensions in XCO course design philosophy. Take the Paris mountain bike course, for example. Long sections of the course were more reflective of a gravel walking track than an elite-level mountain bike course. Tom Pidcock called it “bland.”
On the other end of the spectrum sits Crans Montana in Switzerland, perhaps the most technically demanding XCO course in the series. While features like steep chutes, drops, and rock gardens are fun to watch on TV, Batten said they were too selective in the actual race. The features in themselves are fine, and Batten enjoys technical riding, but argued that if they bog down 90% of the field then that’s a poor design. In other words, XCO shouldn’t be decided by the holeshot.
MSA sits in the middle of that spectrum: mostly natural terrain that is challenging but balanced to create an engaging race.
The Beatrice rock garden – a steep, rocky chute that was used up through 2022 but taken out since – may be an example of a technical section that is sometimes a touch too much. It was no problem for the world’s top riders on an unobstructed line, but if you were in the middle of the field, bottlenecks would force riders to walk down the slope.
However, Cannondale’s global director of sports marketing, Jonathan Geran, added that MSA has so much terrain available that the course designers can easily swap sections of trail in and out, creating a course that feels fresh every year.
Geran adds that having iconic and exciting venues in North America is important for the health of the sport, particularly for American brands like Cannondale, Trek and Specialized who sponsor the World Cup’s top athletes and teams.
A return to the sport’s birthplace
The mythic origin story of mountain biking begins in the United States, but the World Cup circuit (like most of the sport of cycling) is Euro-centric. Following a sport on TV is one thing, but it’s a whole ‘nother one for North American fans to be able to see the speed and technical prowess of Christopher Blevins or Nino Schurter in person, or shake Jolanda Neff’s or Evie Richards’ hand.
“We get to celebrate it a little bit differently than when you have to go over to Europe or you’re just watching it on TV and cheer on your teammates from across the pond,” Geran said. “So it’s a good opportunity to be up in front with the best in the world.”
MSA’s location is also important for that fandom component as well as for the racers to easily get there from Europe. The ski area is less than 60 km (or 35 miles) from Québec City’s Jean Lesage International Airport and under four hours’ drive from Montréal. Thanks to both its proximity to those metros – Canada’s eighth- and second-largest cities, respectively – and its history, any World Cup or World Championship held there attracts hordes of passionate fans. It’s also just a few hours from Lake Placid (a venue the World Cup will return to in 2025) making a geographically convenient stint on the Eastern seaboard for the traveling MTB circus.
Lastly, MSA has always been a double-discipline venue, hosting both cross-country and downhill (for 2025 Lake Placid will also host a DH round). Look up Finn Iles’ or Jackson Goldstone’s winning gravity runs for a bit of Canadian home-country pride. The late Stevie Smith also won there, his name memorialized on one of the track’s biggest drop features.
The Québecois are also known to throw a big party throughout the World Cup weekend, perhaps egged on a bit more from the downhillers compared to the XC riders. As four-time World Downhill Champion Greg Minnaar recounted this week, there are always late nights in MSA, and Saturday is set to be extra rowdy as the South African GOAT races the final World Cup of his quarter-century pro career.
Come Sunday though, the XC riders still have season titles to wrap up – if only in formal terms. Alessandra Keller has the overal XCC overall title wrapped up and the XCO title is all but official. Only Savilia Blunk and Candice Lill are technically in striking distance, but an upset would require one of them to win both races – XCC results are factored into the overall XCO title – and for Keller to finish 34th or worse in the XCO (unlikely: rare DNFs aside, Keller’s worst finish as an elite rider was 30th at last year’s Paris test event).
On the men’s side, World Champion Alan Hatherly leads the XCO by a similarly comfortable margin, with Victor Koretzky and Filippo Colombo mathematically in contention but needing a highly unlikely series of events to jump the South African in the standings. Koretzky’s 154-point lead to Sam Gaze in the XCC standings is, comparatively, a nail-biter. But series titles aside, there’s still a big prize on the line: the honor of winning at the sport’s most historic venue.
From fall color to fall lines, it’ll certainly be a good course to watch the battle play out.
Ryan Simonovich is a cycling writer focused on the off-road side of the sport. Read more of his work on his site, Ryan MTB.
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