The most complicated race yet — and it started before I'd even left.
Andorra was probably the most complicated World Cup of the lot. It began at home: the whole production — camera, microphone, lights, all of it — had to go into hand luggage, because none of it can travel in the hold. So I crammed every camera I own into the smallest backpack I could find. I still don't know how I got it shut.
Andorra is hard to reach at the best of times. Sixteen hours by car, which I wasn't about to do, so I flew Stuttgart to Barcelona, picked up a hire car — which came with a whole saga of its own at the rental desk that I'll spare you — and drove three hours over the border. Exhausting. But the gear arrived in one piece, and that's what counts.
The hotel was a good one — and the first all season to greet me with a welcome beer, which I was very much on board with. Every day then started and ended with the gondola: La Massana up to the venue and back, always against the clock. Stay too long in the media centre and you'd miss the last cabin down; the alternative was walking fifteen hundred vertical metres on foot. I learned to leave a little early.
Home at seven. Fast asleep by half past.
The thing that really got me was the two courses — cross-country and downhill — sitting a ten-minute drive apart, a drive we ended up making in absolutely pouring rain. Thank you, Bernard Kerr of Pivot Factory Racing, for the lift in your truck; without it we'd have walked half an hour and arrived soaked to the bone.
It was the only World Cup where I stayed through to the Monday for a Monday flight, and the journey home was long and brutal. I walked in the door at seven in the evening — and by half past, I was completely out.
