The Three Peaks trail system was a new course in Cedar City for the 2,052 bikers who qualified for the state mountain biking championships. Park City last won the state title in 2015 ending the team’s four-year winning streak.
Team head coach and director Pete Stoughten says the 2,000 qualifiers are only a third of the number of kids who participated on one of the 77 high school mountain bike teams this season.
“7,300 kids race mountain bikes in the state,” Stoughten said. “We’re a quarter of all the mountain bike racers under 18 years old in the country, and the biggest league, biggest race network in the world, really.”
Stoughten says 88 of Park City’s 230 riders (7th to 12th grades) qualified to compete in the two-day championships. It’s a co-ed team broken into divisions between gender and grade levels as well as ability. Everyone races on the same 5.9 mile course - with an almost 500-foot elevation gain. Some of them just take more laps.
“Some kids race two laps, and then our varsity boys race four and our varsity girls race three. So, everybody has their own race that they do on the same course.”
The team this year he says was a deep field with strong riders from the freshmen to seniors.
“Everybody kind of filled in when we had a couple of our top riders had some mechanicals or some crashes,” he said. “So that's what made it really stand out.”
Stoughten says the course was a fun one with plenty of technical challenges and great photo opportunities for parents.
In other results – Wasatch High School finished 8th in Division 1 and competing in Division 2, South Summit High School finished 2nd. North Summit High School finished 5th in Division 3.
You can see the list of finishers in the web version of this report at kpcw.org.
