UCI Reveals Updated 2020 World Cup Calendar - Double Headers!
After months of cancellations of postponements, the UCI have now announced an updated calendar for World Cup XC and downhill racing.
XC riders will have their entire season condensed into a month while the downhill riders will have a bit more leeway and their season will run from September until November. Leogang is still scheduled to host the World Championships but the date has been pushed back from September 5/6 to October 5 -11 and it will now be a double header of XC and downhill. Lenzerheide will now also be a double header. It was originally supposed to be an XC only weekend but it has now been added to the downhill calendar to bring the season up to 7 rounds.
Three rounds have been scheduled as double rounds. This means that two races will be run back to back in one weekend. The UCI told us that they provisionally imagine it will run as follows:
Downhill: Thursday - Qualifying 1, Friday - Race 1 // Saturday - Qaulifying 2, Sunday - Race 2.
Cross Country: Tuesday - Short Track 1, Thursday - XCO 1 // Friday - Short Track 2, Sunday - XCO 2.
However final details are still to be confirmed.
2020 Revised World Cup calendar
5-6 September Lenzerheide, Switzerland (XCO/DHI)
12-13 September Val di Sole, Italy (XCO/DHI)
19-20 September Les Gets, France (XCO/DHI)
29 September - 4 October Nove Mesto na Morave, Czech Republic (XCO) – two rounds
5 - 11 October Leogang, Austria, World Championships (XCO/DHI)
15-18 October Maribor, Slovenia (DHI) – two rounds
29 October - 1st November Lousa, Portugal (DHI) – two rounds
Press Release: UCI
The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) today announces that the new calendar for the 2020 Mercedes-Benz UCI Mountain Bike World Cup as well as the dates of the next UCI Mountain Bike World Championships presented by Mercedes-Benz, were approved by the UCI Management Committee, which met yesterday during an extraordinary meeting at the initiative of the UCI President David Lappartient in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The calendars of UCI events for the other disciplines – except road1 – will be announced at a later date, but as soon as possible. The UCI Management Committee also gave its approval for the new qualification system for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, adapted following the postponement of the events to 2021.
Since cycling competitions were halted mid-March, the world health crisis has taken a heavy toll on our sport, with around one thousand events postponed or cancelled at the request of their organisers. This represents 45% of the UCI International Calendar. After road cycling, mountain bike is the hardest hit: it counts for 30% of the postponements and cancellations (road 40%) and has seen 45% of its events affected by the coronavirus.
With a view to the resumption of the 2020 cycling season, set for 1st July 2020 – 1st August for the UCI WorldTour and UCI Women’s WorldTour -, and in accordance with our announcement on 20 March, the UCI has given priority to the UCI World Championships and rounds of the UCI World Cup when drawing up the new UCI International Mountain Bike Calendar.
The 2020 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships presented by Mercedes-Benz for cross-country, initially scheduled to take place in Albstadt (Germany) from 26 to 28 June, had to be cancelled. The UCI is pleased to announce that the town of Leogang (Austria) which was already due to host the 2020 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships for downhill presented by Mercedes Benz, as well as the 2020 Red Bull UCI Pump Track World Championships, has accepted to add the cross-country specialties (cross-country Olympic, cross-country relay and E-mountain bike) to its programme. The UCI World Championships will take place from 5 to 11 October 2020. The UCI applauds the decision of the organisers and the Austrian National Federation for cycling and is delighted to be able to maintain the 2020 edition of the discipline’s leading annual event. It underlines that the health of the athletes and all parties concerned remain the overriding priority, and that all necessary measures will be taken in this regard.
As for the 2020 Mercedes-Benz UCI Mountain Bike World Cup, the UCI is pleased to announce today the dates and venues for the rounds of this circuit. This announcement comes after a long consultation procedure with stakeholders. The series was initially to comprise ten rounds (six for cross-country Olympic/cross-country short track, eight for downhill). As a consequence of the pandemic, four organisers were obliged to cancel their event: Losinj (Croatia), Fort William (Great Britain), Vallnord Pal Arinsal (Andorra) and Mont-Sainte-Anne (Canada). The new calendar, which spreads from next September to November, comprises six destinations, of which three will host two rounds. The UCI would like to acknowledge the mountain bike community’s spirit of cooperation which made it possible to establish a solid and attractive calendar in such a short time, despite the difficult situation.
The UCI President David Lappartient declared: “The announcement of the 2020 UCI World Cup calendar and the holding of the 2020 UCI World Championships is excellent news for mountain bike, a discipline greatly affected by the consequences of the coronavirus. It is another step, after the announcement of the professional road cycling calendars, towards a resumption of the cycling season from this summer. The confirmation of the Olympic and Paralympic qualification systems will also make the future clearer for our athletes, who will be able to move forward with their training and competition schedule with a view to the Tokyo Games next year. Our calendars remain dependent on the international health situation, but we are moving in the right direction, and I thank the cycling family that has again demonstrated its sense of responsibility, its solidarity and its courage in these times that are extremely difficult for everybody.”
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Bro, you have been glued to the doom and gloom media outlets for too long. Go outside or do something productive with you time.
(India, with a much poorer populace and poorer access to healthcare than the US has a mortality rate of 3%, Australia, a country with roughly 1/10th of the US's populations has only 98 deaths...if USA was an indicator of handling this situation well, then Australia's numbers should scale down to 1/10th that of the USA, or 8,500 deaths...but no, they are 87 times less than that. The UK has a mortality rate of 14%, Sweden 12.5%...why pick out these two as well? Because they both went for the herd immunity idea - Sweden stuck with it, but the UK backtracked out of it shortly after it was mooted (but the disease had already taken hold by then)...now Trump would like the USA to "open up" well before your positive count trend has trended down significantly to consider the disease under control. This will place the USA in the herd immunity experiment, but with so many already infected in the USA, the results will most likely be worse than UK or Sweden in terms of mortality rate. While I agree that we can't all stay sitting inside from here on in, and financial ruin will abound if we did, it is a pretty shitty thing to choose between lives and essentially dollars. It's all good until it's you on the hospital bed)
If you even took at face value your 1% mortality rate, then COVID-19 is still 666% (a factor of 6.66x) worse than influenza...thus if you take the 60,000 deaths from influenza and multiply by 6.66, you would expect 400,000 deaths attributable to COVID-19.
Sadly, the USA deaths will far exceed your current 85,000. Will it reach 400,000? No one really knows. But prevention is better than cure (especially when there is no cure). Perhaps all steps that can be taken should be taken to prevent the numbers going higher, don't you think?
Of course these are all just numbers. So it doesn't mean much as, well, numbers aren't people are they? Well, not until it's your father, or sister, or child, that is.
So good luck with your "chances", you are free to make your own choices in life, but only if they don't hurt someone else. But in this instance, your choice might just hurt a lot of other people.
Good luck, and take care.
(and by the by...even here in NZ, where we have pretty much eliminated COVID-19 (things like our geographical positioning certainly have helped that, but mostly the buy in by the public to lockdown strictly for seven weeks and closing our borders to all international flights very early on has done the trick), we have had 21 deaths from 1428 cases - a mortality rate of 1.3%. Still this is over 6x higher than our average mortality rate due to influenza where we average 200,000 cases a year, and 400 deaths, for a mortality rate of 0.2%...the majority of our COVID deaths have come from one old-persons home (just under 50%), and now we are faced with the economic rebuild (which will be years with our sovereign debt projected as $203-billion NZD (or close to $120-billion USD), but a drop in the bucket to the USA's unfortunate position)
@handynzl: Those numbers you have given are debatable. From what I've been reading on New York's mess, many deaths not caused by coronavirus 19, are being attributed to the stats. There's big incentives for hospitals to mark death as caused by coronavirus 19, like in the tune of thousands of dollars
Here in home province, over 88% of deaths from coronavirus 19, are the elderly, and people with compromised immune systems, me the latter
But i'm not up in a tizzy, something is going to get you sooner or later. So get out and enjoy life, not stuck to the commie tube all day, and that's fact!
Riddle me this batman, how many people have died so for this year, from lets say, the flu?... Or chronic alcoholism...
Life will go on, no matter what happens, no matter what we humans try to come up with, God's own nature has a way of sorting things out in the end, and that's the fact. I say protect the people who need protection (elderly, infirmed, compromised immune system, ect), and the rest of us healthy people, go on living are lives, earning incomes, which in turn, fund the taxes to pay for the health care, that takes care of the people who need care.
Flu has treatments, even some vaccines.
Alcoholism can be self inflicted, and has treatment too.
COVID-19 has no treatment currently, and no cure. All we currently have is prevention.
As for being paid to say it was COVID - certainly that is not happening here in NZ, and I would doubt in any place that hospital care is not pre-conditioned on insurance. The US has many faults to which they bury their heads in the sand about, and many are being highlighted in their fractured response to the current situation.
We are all in this together, and I will not try to argue with someone that doesn't want to accept verified numbers for whatever reason. All the stats are readily available...you can apply much the same logic to people that will die from influenza as many that get the flu will simply soldier on and take an aspirin, thus pushing the mortality rate for influenza even lower in reality.
Everyone just needs to take care, and stop and think if their actions could end up spreading this disease, which as of today still has no treatment or cure, I will repeat.
All the best to all, and I truly hope that none of your loved ones contract this disease in any way, shape or form. NZ got lucky, and it's been somewhat heartbreaking to hear from overseas work partners whom have lost a family member, or staff members.
Take care, and don't snot-rocket on anyone when you're out riding!!
E.g. say nobody from France could travel, or nobody from England, what then?
Really want to see some racing this year, I just won’t hold my breath just yet :-(
It kills fat people.
How many fat mtb fans do you see?
Covid 19 85,000 killed. "Stop being paranoid and get back to work"
No one is thinking that proportion of symptomatic people who test positive is an accurate reflection of IFR - well, maybe some armchair experts.
Your understanding of who is suffering from this virus is grossly flawed. It isn’t just the elderly who suffer.
People - stop trying to come up with your own estimates. There are way smarter people out there who are way more informed on this than you doing such calculations.
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/us-coronavirus-outbreak-out-control-test-positivity-rate/610132
It'll be more like Multi-Day Stage Racing. I think it'll bring out some interesting racing and results.
And, as smgishot13 pointed out, they're all playing on the same field. Ride On!
Less thunderstorms though. ????
Worth the trip out to Maribor?
Rain an mud is a possibility. 50-50.
@RobotXander for sure it is worth a trip to Maribor. Two hours drive.
Well thank you mister infected-bat-eating chinese man!!
Countries have to be open and accepting of travelers without 14 days of quarantine.
Countries have to be open to large groups congregating in one place.
Hotels, restaurants etc have to be open and ready to go.
Not too sure if countries like Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic or Portugal are going to be there by then.
Riders have to be able to train outdoors too for a few weeks/moths leading up to start dates of events. Many have been training indoors. Not too sure if their conditioning will be there.
Please add your comments
Also will there be any time for mid-season setup changes. Ride what ya brung!
Who will be left standing? Can't wait for this, bring on September 5th!
Hoping for just a fun dynamic different race season for all the guys n gals
Would be really interested to get a riders perspective on this schedule. I am sure they are excited to race but they have to be weary. As fan though, awesome!
World cups represent about 10% of the racing that a Pro's do. Typical race season is at least 40 days of racing. Yes, Christmas week in CX is tough, but CX racers do 1 week like that. Pro-XC racers are typically doing 1 to 3 week long stage races per year. And those races are made up of stages that are 3-5hrs.
Do The UCI Have any idea of time line of lock down being lifted or just wishful thinking?
First to set up their cahmping van from scratch wins!