28th Asian MTB Championships 2023 – Kerala
The 28th Asian MTB Championships 2023 landed in Kerala, India. A first time for India as a host of the Asian continental mountain biking championships (DH & XC). It took 28 years for this MTB competition to finally make it to the Indian shores. Joining in Ponmudi, a hill town near Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala were my Bengaluru buddies Ignatius Chen (Iggy) and Shashank CK. Iggy was driving down his fully equipped bike workshop van, to provide unofficial support to the Indian athletes who were otherwise without any quality mechanical support in Ponmudi.
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As I was simply visiting to check out the event, I was travelling without a bike or any riding gear. On arrival at the venue, walking the DH course, some of the officials overseeing the event proceedings approached me with a request. They wanted me to help them with UCI’s mandatory trail safety sweep runs before and after the DH race is conducted. This, coming one day before the seeding runs are to be flagged off!
Thanks to Iggy and Shashank for lending me their bike and riding gear for rolling over the trail.
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Seeing this ill planning and mediocre DH race track built by an inexperienced team, it was disappointing to say the least. Nonetheless, our India being the host to this 28th Asian MTB Championship, my buddies and I assembled to roll out the requested duties, for FREE. Thinking back, our local backyard DH races are better organized, keeping the young racers and good vibes at core!
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With China taking home the big win in ‘Elite Men’ category of the Downhill race, India’s best result was an 8th place by Titus from Meghalaya. In spite of being the host nation, with all the time and resources available to create an excellent DH course and have our Indian DH team on top of their game on this home course, India couldn’t deliver as imagined. Could this be a result of having an incompetent Indian operations/management team behind the scenes?
All we can hope for is a better future for DH racing in India in the coming years. Which only the private race organizers can boost, like we have over the past 15 years. The government organizations overseeing DH Racing in India haven’t aided to any significant growth of this discipline of mountain biking.
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On the positive side, this Kerala visit for me turned out to be awesome having met my old friends after long. Super shout-out to Ignatius Chen (Iggy), Shashank CK, Jibin Joy (Chippy) for sharing some wonderful days in the beautiful misty mountains of Ponmudi.
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