Mark Kariya | November 17, 2018
The 93rd International Six Days Enduro (ISDE) in Viña del Mar, Chile, is drawing to a close with a couple Americans rising to the top of their respective classes on the fifth day. In the team standings, the U.S. World Trophy (WT), Junior World Trophy (JWT) and Women’s World Trophy (WWT) teams all have a firm grip on second place in each division.
Team USA Still Holding On To Second Place
Brandy Richards, for example, has rallied back from a relatively slow, crash-filled first day to get closer and closer to Australia’s Tayla Jones each day, and the fifth day saw the Arizona native claim the top spot in the day’s first five special tests. In the sixth and last test, Jones beat her by less than a half second and still leads the category for the week. But Richards and teammates Tarah Gieger and Becca Sheets welcomed the morale boost on what’s been a physically demanding week.
“It was just a really tough Six Days,” Gieger shared. “It was hard to ride that stuff. It was hard to find where to push and where not to push too much—it was a tough balance to find.
“Everything was really hard-packed with a layer of silt on it, but we didn’t really ride on anything flat all week so that made it pretty tough. It wasn’t so much the hills; it was the hills into massive off-cambers and trying to stop for them. It’s nothing we usually ride because no one would really make anything like that because it’s not that fun. Other people were just better at it.”
In the WT race, American Taylor Robert, once again, proved to be the fastest of the E2 riders, but E3 leader Daniel Milner of Australia, once again, did him one better by topping the overall individual standings, 28.21 seconds faster than Robert’s time for the day.
And he wasn’t the only American in the top five overall. Steward Baylor shook off the pain from his crashes on the first day to post the fourth-best individual time of the day again, giving him fourth overall in the progressive standings.
Along with Ryan Sipes and Zach Bell, the U.S. WT team remains second to Australia, Bell saying, “Today was my best day of all five days. I felt the best energy-wise [and] felt good on the tracks.”
He added, “This is an experience I’ve wanted to learn and I can say I’ve finally completed five days; we’ve just got one more. It was good—a lot of struggles at the beginning of the week with falls and lappers and stuff like that.”
Australia remains the WT leader over the U.S. with Italy third by more than four minutes.
The U.S. JWT team of Grant Baylor, Ben Kelley and Josh Toth got solid performances from all three today. In fact, their team time of three hours, seven minutes and 5.45 seconds beat the Italian time by nearly 50 seconds, Italy retaining the JWT lead with France a fairly distant third.
Several of America’s Club teams also had reason to celebrate. While the RPM/Mt. Baker trio of Cooper Abbott, Ryan Kudla and Dante Oliveira maintained a somewhat distant fourth in the standings, Gas Gas North America (Travis Coy, Tyler Vore and Trent Wisnant) are sixth and Missouri Mudders (James King, Nick O’Bryant and Talon Soenksen) are eighth.
Day Five Video Highlights
Individually, J.T. Baker shined again. The C3 leader for the week so far is joined by Vore in third and Coy in fourth.
Though he was slightly off today, Oliveira holds fifth in the C2 progressive results, Abbott eighth. Soenksen is fifth in C1.
Tomorrow is all about the final motocross tests, held a few miles up the coast on a specially prepared track near the beach.
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