The 2020 World Cup Mountain Biking event in Mont-Sainte-Anne, Quebec has been cancelled due to coronavirus according to James Smurthwaite of pinkbike.com on Tuesday. The men’s and women’s cross country events were to take place on August 23. However, all public events have been cancelled in Quebec until the end of August. There are currently 33,417 cases of coronavirus in Quebec and 2398 deaths.
The World Cup in Quebec was to be the fourth of six cross country mountain biking events on the 2020 calendar. It was to follow events in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic in May; Vallnord, Andorra in June, and Lenzerheide, Switzerland in August.
To date, the World Cup in Vallnord was also cancelled on April 14. At this time, the World Cup mountain biking events in Lenzerheide and Nove Mesto have been postponed. The World Cup events in Val di Sole, Italy, and Les Gets, France, are going on as scheduled. They were to take place the weekend of September 12-13 and 19-20 respectively.
Two other major mountain biking competitions will also not take place in 2020. The men’s cross country mountain biking event at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo was to take place on July 27 and the women’s cross country mountain biking competition at the 2020 Olympic Games was to take place on July 28. Both of those events will now occur in 2021. Meanwhile, the 2020 World Mountain Biking Championships from Albstadt, Germany, which was to take place from June 26-28, has also been cancelled because of coronavirus.
There are currently two Canadian women ranked in the top 15 of the International Cycling Union World Rankings for women’s cross country mountain biking. Canadian Olympic bronze medalist Catharine Pendrel of Fredericton, New Brunswick is 14th and Emily Batty of Brooklin, Ontario is 15th. Pendrel won the bronze medal for Canada in women’s mountain biking at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
