Behold, the Megavalanche mountain bike race: A 30 kilometer marathon in the French Alps that starts at the 3,300 meter summit of the Pic Blanc and ends 2,500 meters below in the Allemont Valley. After two days of practice and qualifying races, nearly 3,000 participants are whittled down to the 150 for the final complete marathon from mountain top to valley floor.
You have to be crazy to experience the Megavalanche, or at least you had to be until the advent of the GoPro. Now, you can sit back in the comfort of your home and snack on Doritos while questioning the sanity of professional mountain biker and Team Polygon UR member Jamie Nicoll. He rolled down the snow-covered trail, over competitors, and into unforgiving piles of rubble to take seventh place.
What’s the worst that could happen?*
*Worst things that could happen include taking a header into a boulder, getting run over by other mountain bikers, falling over the foot-high snow barriers and off the side of a cliff, hitting a patch of rocks and wiping out, hitting someone else’s abandoned bike and wiping out, concussions, brain trauma, spine trauma, partial paralysis, full paralysis, coma, death, etc. But totally worth it for the rush, right?
