Cochrane’s Cody Matechuk battled his way back from sixth place at the 2017 X Games last weekend to earn a bronze medal in the inaugural men’s Snow BikeCross.
“It was insane the whole time,” said the 22-year-old athlete.
The long-time motocross champion – who is relatively new to the winter sport – was invited to race in the category, introduced for the first time at this year’s pinnacle of extreme sport competition in Aspen, Colorado.
Matechuk came out strong from the start and ran the first couple laps of the 30-lap race in fourth place. By the third go-round, the Cochrane athlete had pushed into third and after early leader Nolan Heppner from Minnesota lost control of his bike, Matechuk moved up one more position to second. Fellow Canadian (and eventual winner) Brock Hoyer held on to first in the field of 16 riders.
In Lap 10, Hoyer stunned the crowd watching live on ESPN around the world when he unexpectedly went down. The fumble put Matechuk in the lead.
“We were a little bit back and I wasn’t on Hoyer as much as I wanted to be. With that, it put us up front, and that was awesome,” Matechuk recalled.
Hoyer recovered from the crash and soon was on Matechuk’s bumper. The two battled hard as the track degraded under the pressure of so many bikes. Matechuk’s most difficult challenge came in Lap 15 when his bike stalled out, and he plummeted to sixth place.
“The track was getting ice – when I was pushing, just trying to smooth everything out … as soon as I touched the rear brake, it just locked up and stalled the bike,” he said. “I screamed a little bit there … I lost a lot of time.”
The Cochranite methodically clawed his way through traffic, and by Lap 23 appeared again in fourth. The next round, Matechuk pushed further into pole position and settled at third – where he remained until the end of the race. Hoyer, who was favoured to win, held onto the first place for most of the race and came home with the gold.
“I got really aggressive with my passing – it was like pulling your hat down and time to do work. I ended up banging bars with a lot of people, one at a time, focusing on not going down,” Matechuk said, adding he was so fixated on grinding it out, he didn’t know if he had medalled until after he crossed the finish line.
“After (the stall) happened, I had no idea what position I was,” he said. “I was worried there for a while.”
Matechuk is back home in Cochrane and will now prepare for Round 1 of the Canadian Snow Bike MX Nationals series in Revelstoke, B.C.
