Yesterday, Jackson Goldstone won the 2025 Downhill Mountain Bike World Championship. Here’s the POV of his winning run down the *very* steep course in Champéry, Switzerland. (This is *bananas*!)
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Here's the non-POV video of his run. He beat the best riders in the world by 2 seconds.
Who/what is doing the camera work in the non-POV video (at the 1:17 mark, for example) ? Must be a drone?
What's the story with the whistles? They seem deliberate.
The course marshals whistle when each competitor goes past, alerting those down the hill that someone is coming. You also hear chainsaws, which people use like cowbells to cheer people on. 🤷♂️
Incredible.
Wow, the non-POV really shows how steep it is.
Yeah, it's instructive to watch them both. The GoPro is wide-angle and meant to look fast, but with the non-POV you can see that he really is going fast and good god, just impossibly steep.
Made it a little over 50 seconds and had to take a break to catch my breath.
Ho-lee! Zero room for error at that speed and pitch. A few hills in my neck of the woods and we used to make downhill runs before the advent of body armour and serious helmets but nothing that hairy, narrow and fast! Still, a rare day that blood wasn't spilled, and I lost a front tooth :) Good times.
Holy crap. That is a really intense 3+ minutes. It was really interesting to watch his line selection in the POV video, and then hear the commentators in the non-POV video gasp at some those selections.
The next generation is already coming up. Here's 10-year-old Weston Lukens doing the most casual backflips on a mountain bike that you're ever going to see.
Here's a video of an experienced rider and a weekend-warrior level rider getting down the same route.
https://youtu.be/byAflkDCA6s?si=egbhPMDbKCarzyPq
Champéry was the site of one of the best mountain bike runs ever, by Brit Danny Hart in 2011. This is extremely entertaining to watch, not only for the riding but also the commentary...they completely lose their minds.
Here's a look back at that run from just last week:
An analysis of the women's and men's DH races at Champéry, including a look at what made Goldstone's run so fast.
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