What an exciting and surprising race it was for the Snowboard Cross elite at the first of two competitions here at the World Championships in Bakuriani, Georgia on Wednesday, 01 February 2023 with Czech’s Eva Adamczykova bagging gold in the women’s event to claim her second world championships title and Austrian’s Jakob Dusek, topping the men’s edition to claim his first medal at world championships.
The race which was originally planned for Friday, 03 March took place two days earlier due to bad weather forecasts for the next days. Besides that, also the format got changed. Instead of qualification runs, FIS together with the OC and the teams decided to start with pre-heats. This means, all athletes directly start in knock-out format ranked according to the seeding list. For men we saw 16 heats with 3 athletes and for women 8 heats with 3 or 4 athletes in the first round. Best two advances to the well know eight and quarter finals.
The biggest surprise we already saw in the pre-heats, as both reigning world champions Charlotte Bankes (GBR) and Lucas Eguibar (ESP) didn`t advance to the finals of top 16 women and top 32 men which were going down at 13:00 LOC.
Adamczykova unbeaten
In Wednesday’s world championships big final, we saw the young Australian Josie Baff in red, the experienced American and fife time world champion Lindsey Jacobellis in green, French Manon Petit Lenoir in blue and Czech Eva Adamczykova in yellow.
The young French Petit Lenoir had the fastest reaction time, but Adamczykova who won every single heat all day long was leading the four athletes out of the start section into the first bank followed by Petit Lenoir, Baff and Jacobellis in fourth position.
Until intermediate one the snowboard train was riding down the course in the same order, with Adamczykova breaking away from the others more and more.
After this section the 20-year-old Australian Baff gained so much speed that she overtook Petit Lenoir. The French rider got surprised by this pass, got a little bit out of balance and lost so much speed that also Jacobellis slightly overtook her.
While Petit Lenoir and Jacobellis were battling all the way down to the finish for the bronze medal, Adamczykova made her own race and claimed her second world championships gold medal. Also Baff was so far away from her prosecutors that she brought home the silver medal easily. In the end Jacobellis received the bronze medal and Petit Lenoir got fourth which is her best world championships result.
