Rider Diary: Tracy Moseley 
Interview with Tracy Moseley - September 2009
Britain's most established female downhiller, Tracy Moseley has been racing at the highest level for 15 years and is one of the only gravity racers to have won a round of both the downhill and fourcross World Cup, alongside multiple national titles and the prestigeous UCI Downhill Mountain Bike World Cup in 2006. With only the rainbow stripes elluding the Malvern-based rider, 2010 and Mont St. Anne would be an apt counterpoint to Steve Peat's astonishing World Championship title in 2009. Read Tracy's feature-length interview here, before catching the latest in her rider diary.
October 25 2010
My two weeks at home before heading out to the final racing trip of the year were great fun, as we were hosting a youth mountain bike event at home on the farm. The last race we had on the farm was back in 1993 so it's been a while in the making...
With the help of my local newly formed club, Malvern Cyclesport we put on a local development day for 6-16 year olds. There are quite a few similar opportunities for road and track, but very few races or coaching sessions for kids at a grass roots level for mountain biking so it was great to be able to do this event. We had around 60 kids across all ages.
I helped out with some coaching and riding with the kids. I thoroughly enjoyed the day and was so excited to see so many young little rippers loving being out on their bikes in the woods. Hopefully it will become an annual event. Soon after the tape was cleared away from that event, I was on the plane out to the USA for the last trip of the year. It was the big ones, World Cup finals and the World Championships.
The World Cup finals were in a new venue in the north of New York State. It was a pretty small town and even smaller hill, but the town's enthusiasm got the race to visit Windham and it turned out to be a great event.
When I first walked the track I wasn't that impressed as it didn't look as though it would flow all that well, but after a wet start to practice the course really bedded in well and by race day it was dry and riding so fast it was good fun. I was finally starting to find my speed and felt good in practice, and backed my feeling up by qualifying in first place. This was just what I needed at this point in the year. I was confident for the final, but a crash in practice on the morning of the race and a few costly mistakes in my final run just took the edge off my riding and pushed me back into second place in the final. However it was my best World Cup result of the year and was good enough to push me up into third in the Overall ranking for the World Cup Series, so it helped make my World Cup season not look so bad!
It was then a long eight hour drive up to Mont St. Anne for the World Champs, we needed to be there the following day, so I did some of the drive straight after the race at Windham and the rest on the Monday morning. As soon as we arrived it was straight into walking the course.
Mont St. Anne is a pretty significant venue for me as it was the first place that I raced a World Cup and I also competed back in 1998 at the World Championships, so I have raced there more than any other venue. In all those years I have never seen the course as dry as it was when I walked it at the start of the 2010 World Champs week! It was so loose and dusty it was incredible.
During the first day of practice it was so hard to follow anyone as the dust just lingered in the air for so long it was pretty dangerous. The good weather stayed for the first few days but there were rumours that the weather would change, but it was still good for the timed training session where I posted the fastest time.
Although this sounds good it's always a bit of a lottery as it doesn't count for anything and you just don't know how hard people have tried, so I couldn't take too much confidence from this although it was good to see how hard a full race pace run was going to be.
The Worlds week is so different to World Cups as we had all week to practice, just in 1.5hr sessions, so we had lots of hanging around the rest of the time. The one good thing is that there are always other events going on so I took time to watch the XC racing and loved it as we had some great rides from the Brits with Annie Last having an amazing ride to take second in the U23 and seeing Liam back in good form was also cool to see. I also had some Trek team interest and seeing Mathias win the U23 world title was amazing, I stood at the podium seeing how much it meant to him, and inside I was thinking ‘I so hope that could be me one day!'
As the week progressed the weather worsened and by race day we had been riding in mud and fog in practice but the sun seemed to be coming out during the Junior men's downhill race. I watched my team mate Neko Mullaly miss out on the world title by 0.06sec and felt so gutted for him. I know how cruel this sport can be as I have many times been so close and then so gutted to lose out.
By now, my turn came around and as I headed up the hill I was still deciding whether or not to change to dry tyres. The track looked so dry on the way up the gondola, but just as I started warming up the rain started and there was no question, mud tyres it was going to be!
As soon as I left the start gate there was rain on my goggles....yet another wet race. It made the course pretty tough going at the top as the mud turned pretty thick and there was alot of pedalling to keep your speed. I had a pretty good run, I really tried to give it my all on all the pedalling sections and got through all the technical sections without any mistakes. The only place I really felt as though I nearly lost it was right at the bottom on the last rock section where I had a big slide and thought I was going down. Luckily I got some grip and stayed up right to the finish line to take the hot seat with three riders left.
I really didn't know if my ride was going to be good enough, but as each rider came down nowhere near my time it was starting to look like I might have finally done it! I don't think I could believe it when the final result was posted, I had won and become World Champion, it was incredible, the dream I have had for the last 15 years of racing had finally been achieved...wow.....It just didn't feel real.
It was only when so many people came to congratulate me and they really seemed so genuinely happy to see me win that I started to realise what I had just done. I really felt like a deserved World Champion and it still feels amazing as I write this now. All those days of training, all that goal setting all those early nights to bed, all that stretching, everything that has gone into trying to achieve this goal over the last 15 years had finally all seemed worth it. Mission accomplished!
I left Mont Ste Anne one very satisfied person with an enormous amount of extra text messages and email messages! The season was not over though I still had a couple more weeks of work before I headed home - and you can read all about that next week...
Tracy
