“For the glory of Skagway!” Coufal is pumped as he finally reaches the summit, and Jessie Rapin (right) pedals to keep ahead of a German rider halfway up the pass. She’d fall behind but pass her opponent at the finish.
Story and photos by Jeff Brady
Riding with the wind
Skagway team survives bike switch, hits the drafts
“It feels like I’m in a game show,” said Team USA’s Eric Coufal, as he downed a soda in the WP&YR depot before the Fulda Challenge mountain bike climb up the pass. “This may be a wilderness event, but everything’s catered.”
A few minutes later, his elation was reduced to panic at the starting line, when he discovered that his bike had been switched, probably by mistake. At the last minute, he was given a kid’s bike that was too small, and it took him a while to make adjustments and get used to it.
Then, as he started to make progress catching up to the pack, Coufal had a flat tire just before Moore bridge. “There’s nothing I could do about that,” he said.
Neither local team member was looking forward to the hill climb event in miserable conditions - a south storm had blown in overnight, turning snow into slush.
“I’m not a mountain biker,” Rapin said about halfway up. And at the summit, when told it was all downhill from there, she said, “I know that’s not true!”
Despite everything going wrong, Coufal charged up the pass and crested the summit in a whiteout, but with the stiff south wind pushing him all the way to Fraser.
“For the glory of Skagway!” he yelled, raising a fist in the air.
Meanwhile, Rapin remembered watching the Tour de France on TV as she caught up to a German rider, got in a draft behind her, and then “pushed it” to pass her at the finish line. Rapin took a respectable fourth place among women with a time of 2:06:58.
“It felt good except for my butt, but everyone’s hurts,” she said.
Coufal crossed at 2:40:00, making it just before the pack moved on to Carcross. “I’m glad I made the cutoff,” he said, barely having time to chat before the Fulda people motioned their car to move along.
Dirk Ostertag of Germany and Werner Haller of Italy crossed the finish line first in 1:44:23. The top woman was Anita Krenn of Austria in 1:48:14, followed by Tamara Goeppel of the Yukon team in 1:53:03. The Yukon’s Thomas Tetz took fourth in 1:57:32.
Team Italy edged the Yukon’s Team Canada for the overall team title. Haller won the men’s overall title by five points over Tetz, and Goeppel won the women’s overall title by three points over Italy’s Judith Lanthaler. For more results, see www.fulda-challenge.com.