Canada’s Roland Green won the UCI Mountain Bike World Championship in the Elite Men’s XC category with this ride in Vail, Colorado, on September 16, 2001. The race took place just five days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that took down the World Trade Center in New York City.
Since most of the racers from overseas had already flown into Colorado for the World Championships, the races went on as scheduled.
The MBA staff wasn’t that lucky. Our staff had to drive to Vail, Colorado, from Southern California to get to the race site, since all commercial airline traffic in the U.S. was immediately stopped on 9/11, right after the attacks. There were no commercial flights anywhere in the U.S. again until September 14th, three days after the attacks of September 11th.
The 9/11 attacks were committed by terrorists who had hijacked four commercial airliners, two of which were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and one of which was flown into the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C. A fourth airliner was also hijacked, but that one crashed in the countryside in an unpopulated area in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. The passengers on that plane attacked the terrorists who had hijacked the flight, but the passengers were unable to stop the terrorists from crashing that plane, although the passengers did keep the terrorists from crashing the plane into the White House or the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C., which were thought to be the likely targets of that fourth airliner.
Roland Green went on win the World Championship title a second time in 2002.
A few years later, a series of crashes that Roland suffered while road biking caused him injuries that ended his racing career.
Roland Green now works as a welder in Canada.
Below you can see the photo of Roland Green that we ran in the magazine after he won the title:
(Photos by John Ker/Mountain Bike Action)