Discussion: OUSA Elite MTBO Team 2013: Apply Now If Interested

Here's the MTBO Team Application news announcement (from the OUSA website).

Please feel free to read it and pass it around to anyone (well, any American) who'd be a great addition to the Team.

Good luck, I hope you get a team (male and female) this year. It'll be good to have people from outside Europe compete so maybe the Europeans might realise there are people from outside their continent interested in the sport and relax the new selection rules in place that I think will kill the sport globally.

Incidentally, any idea how many Americans will be allowed to ride in the long final?

My understanding - anyone believe differently? - is that the new rules effectively restrict "developing MTBO nations" like the US to one slot (per gender) this year in the Long.

That sounds about right and unless you can regularly send riders to World Cup races (in Europe), that's how it's going to stay.

That's how I read the rules also. We get one slot per gender and that person needs to do really well in order to gain another slot the following year. It's similar to team selection for the Olympics for mountain biking and why some of the best mountain bikers go to Europe to chase points instead of racing quality races in the states.

Speaking of best mountain bikers (like you, Sue!) - it would be great if US mountain bikers would spread the word about the *MTBO* Elite Team Call to *MTB* forums. Just post the announcement with the link. Thanks!

We've had no luck in Western Australia converting XC mountain bikers into MTBOers. They're just not interested in reading a map, just want to go around and around and around...

I thought the problem was the other way for you your start MTBO man going over to XC.

Greg you might want to post this in the AR forum as well.

Sure - done. I guess I shouldn't assume a 100% overlap between the forums, eh?

Ifor, yeah there was that problem but that was more a money issue than a perception issue. MTBO doesn't pay out enough!

We have had some pure cycelists come into MTBO rather than O people that can not run any more comeing into it like me. In the UK we have very few proper MTBO races there are legal issues that make areas and permissions for a standard cross country course hard. We have a good set of Score format events over 3+hours using standard OS mapping. The CX cycelists have an easier time coming into this sort of event, if they are at all competent with the map they find themselves towards the top of the results which helps. We then try and get them to a proper MTBO event and they may find they have work to do nav wise some take up the challenge of improving some don't.