CANMORE – Besides looking like a deployed parachute at one point, Banff’s Finn Borstmayer had a brilliant weekend of racing at the 2022 Rundle Mountain Road Festival.
Winning gold in criterium (crit), silver in hill climb and third overall in omnium points, the CAT 5 racer biked so impressively on June 4-5 that he upgraded to CAT 4 in what was a first real taste of road cycling.
“I was just going out there to get some good experience and hopefully get upgraded out of CAT 5 – the crit and hill race let me do that,” Borstmayer said.
In Saturday’s crit, which is the most exciting and intense race of the road fest, the CAT 5 men biked around the 1.3 km downtown loop 14 times. On a short course like the crit, riding shoulder-to-shoulder in the pack has its benefits, which Borstmayer – and other riders – game planned for.
“In short races like that, taking the wind burns a lot of matches, so I kind of just wanted to sit on a couple of people's wheels,” he said.
It set up a “big drag race” down the final stretch as the pack spread out over two lanes and burned rubber to the finish line.
With just a little more extra gas in his engine, Borstmayer, a former speed skater, pulled ahead to claim top spot at a time of 26:09.
“I didn’t go in expecting to win,” he said. “Part way through I had a good feeling I could get a good result in this and it worked out in the end.”
Later on Saturday, the riders took on the mammoth Silvertip for the 1.94 km hill climb. For Borstmayer, who’s an enduro coach at Rundle Mountain Cycling Club, he’s more accustomed to going down the hills instead.
However, the rookie’s second podium that day awaited him at the top.
“I had never ridden that hill until that race,” he said after winning silver at 6:06.6 – approximately 13 seconds back of first place Max Garvey. “I started way too hard. It was definitely fatiguing on the legs and an all out effort for the six minutes.”
The final challenge of the weekend was Sunday’s 66 km road race, which started at Our Lady of the Snows and went to the Canmore Nordic Centre and back in four, 16.5 km loops.
The skies opened up and the course was wet, so naturally, Borstmayer wore a rain jacket. Although, a wardrobe malfunction ended up costing Borstmayer time and dropped him back from the main pack for the majority of the race.
“They wanted to see our race numbers, so going down the big hill from the Nordic centre, I was trying to undo the raincoat so I could expose my numbers and then the zipper got stuck and it kind of created a big parachute,” he said. “It started blowing me around and when you’re trying to go 60 K down a hill that doesn’t really work out too well.”
He rode solo from that point on and finished 10th.
For hauling in 47 points, Borstmayer won third overall in omnium points. He had tied for second in points, but the tiebreaker went to hill climb winner, Garvey.
