World Trials Championship - Dabill
Round 8 – 30/07/06
Hawkstone Park, England
James Dabill was once again battling hard with Poland’s
Tadeusz Blazusiak at this weekend’s British round of
the Trials World Championship at Hawkstone Park in Shropshire.
Dabill eventually finished the eighth round of the championship
in ninth place, behind Balzusiak, just as they did in the
previous round two weeks ago in Poland.
Since the Polish event, Dabill had sewn-up the European championship
and so was understandably up-beat, approaching the British
round as the newly-crowned European champion. He ran behind
Balzusiak and enjoyed a good opening series of sections, and
was on par with fellow British rider Dougie Lampkin and Marc
Freixa as he headed into the more heavily-wooded sections
of the trial.
However, as the recent British heat-wave gave way to a heavy
rainstorm, Dabill lost his rhythm and following a five, suffered
a series of more maximum marks on the following sections.
Despite this, he completed the first lap of the event with
thirty four marks, against Balzusiak’s forty one.
His performance on the second lap clearly suffered as a result
though and he posted maximum marks on eleven of the fifteen
sections that made up the trial. He arrived at the finish
trailing Balzusiak by three markss and in ninth place overall.
“I’m not happy with my performance today,”
he said. “It started well and I was within a handful
of points of Dougie and Marc. Then I had four fives in a row
and from then on, it was five after five after five. I’m
not sure exactly what went wrong – nothing felt obvious.
It was just bad riding on my part.”
“Towards the end of the second lap, I started to lose
interest because I knew I really wasn’t riding well.
But of course, I still tried my hardest to get the best result
I could. At the end of the day, I am happy with ninth but
I know that I could have done better.”
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