Cross-country racers have plenty of different race strategies. One is to go out hard from the start and leave your opponents so far behind that they give up any hope of ever catching you.
Another strategy is to stay near your opponents the whole race so that everything comes down to the final sprint at the end of the race. That’s a good one if you’re a better sprinter than they are.
There are probably dozens of other strategies that riders use depending on how they feel as the race unfolds
Some days the racers might feel strong. Other days they don’t.
We’ve known riders who felt bad at the start of a race but ended up winning anyway. And we’ve known other riders who felt great at the start of a race and ended up losing badly. There’s no way to know for sure how things will turn out in the end.
We’re not sure exactly what Andreas Hestler (in the yellow and black jersey) was feeling this day, but he must have been feeling the pressure here. “Dre” was leading this battle at the Cactus Cup in Arizona, and John Tomac (in the blue jersey) was right behind him for most of the race.
Andreas Hestler (61) leads John Tomac (#1, in the Tioga jersey) at the Cactus Cup in 1996
Was Tomac just biding his time so he could sprint past Hestler at the finish line? There was no way for Hestler to know.
In the 1990’s John Tomac was widely recognized as the best mountain bike racer in the world. He’d won the UCI Men’s XC World Championship in 1991 as well the XC World Cup titles that same year, and he placed second in the UCI Downhill World Championship two times, and he’d won multiple World Cup races in both XC and DH. Tomac knew how to race.
As it turned out, so did Hestler. Andreas was able to stay ahead of Tomac this day to win the Cactus Cup cross-country title for 1996, securing Andreas a place in mountain bike history.