The Greatnesses of Gunn-Rita

Norwegian mountain bike racer Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesja was one of the greatest females racers of all time. She was a multiple World Champion, an Olympic Champion, and so much more. At 45 years old she won a cross country World Cup race, in what turned out to be her last year of competition.

Just before that we caught up for a chat, for the first time in nearly 20 odd years. This week she was re-allocated a World Championship medal, being ungraded after anther rider was stripped of hers.

Here is an extract from our chat a couple of years ago…

ST; Mountain biking has changed a whole lot during your career, it now seems much more serious and professional, maybe even not so friendly. What’s your view on this?

GR; What I’m worried about is the loss of the ideal of what our sport was all about; it was for all kinds of people to be able to enjoy time on their bike offroad, there was room for everyone.

Now, you see the prime focus, because Red Bull TV and the UCI have the series, most of the courses today can not be open or used by fun riders. That’s a scary thing; we are going really far away from the reason the sport was born. And I really don’t like that.

Okay, you need the action, drama and crashes – but it doesn’t only have to be about that. The UCI World Cup could be much more mixed, so that you have natural courses that all levels can come and ride and enjoy, and be a part of it, to ride with the pro’ and talk with the pro’s. 

Now, you feel that the pro’s are there and the amateurs are somewhere else, which is partly why I want to move away from it.

ST; Cross country really took off in the mid 1990’s, few of the original riders from that era still managed to remain relevant. How do you stay in the frame after so long?

GR; We have to train differently, that’s for sure. I was away in 2008-9, when I was pregnant, which was a really bad time to be out, as it was when they really started to change to hand made courses. 

It became, seemingly, competitive between organisers to make courses as scary and dangerous as possible, and that was when I was not on my mountain bike at all.

When I got back on my bike in 2009, I thought that it was over my limit, and was not much fun any more. We were looking as to whether or not it was possible any more, and working a lot on technical training, jumping and pushing each other, really far, out of our skin. 

It was not fun at all; for 2-years we had to push technically, there were some broken ribs and things, but at the same time we liked the challenge, which kept us going.

We wanted to come back and show that we could still make it in XC. When we won the European Championships in 2011, most people had been saying to us that we would never come back again, which gave us an extra boost to do it.