Oregon Super D - Sandy Ridge

Check out this race report from Jordan Lopez...

Good morning,
I just wanted to send you out a brief race recap of my race weekend up in beautiful Sandy (near Portland) Oregon for the 3rd round of the Oregon Super D Series. The race was held on the newly designed "Sandy Ridge Trail System" and this event is in competition for one of the best races of the year. The course was fast and flowly and encompassed every part of All-Mountain/Enduro Racing; rock gardens, drops, table-top jumps, dozens of berms, and miles of single-track. The course was 4.63 miles long and in my race run I finished in 22:58 at just over 12mph avg speed. With this time I finished in 8th of 15 racers and with the competition present I am very happy with this result.



After driving 10 hours and after the 35 min paved road climb I was able to get on the course on Friday afternoon and do one practice run down. The following day I climbed the hill two more times and I was able to work some lines with my teammate Lizzy English. On both of these days, the course was damp and really fast top to bottom. Then it happened, Saturday night and onto Sunday morning the rain started and the course became slick and and very sketchy in parts. Note: In packing for this race, I checked the weather and saw that there was no rain in the schedule, so I decided not to bring mud tires. In hindsight and knowing the Pacific Northwest this was a bad decision. I was stuck racing on dry tires and in my run down the hill I was in a slide or drift most of the way and I came to a complete stop and off the bike in +4 corners. I know that this poor decision in what tires to bring and this cost me at least a minute in my race run which would have put me into the top 5. But live and learn.



Overall I had a amazing weekend of racing and riding in Oregon with some of the best Enduro racers in the country. ORBA, the racing organization of Oregon showed once again that they have the process of MT Bike racing figured out and they ran a seamless race with no hiccups and to top it all off they gave each racer their race time as they crossed the finish line.

Photos by Matt Savage