Reaching the finishing line too fast

At the 20th Red Bull Dolomitenmann he was the man of the day: Lienz’s local hero Alban Lakata was successful in the bike category and thus won the “mother of all extreme sports events” for his team Kolland Topsport Kleine Zeitung. In an interview he looks back on the jubilee race.

Congratulations, Alban! With your victory in the mountainbike race you won the Dolomitenmann title and, with a catch-up chase in the homestretch, you won the race for your team. Would you have thought that was possible 48 hours before?

Well, it wasn’t planned, but everything just ran perfectly for me – that I started the race in second place, for example: Because of this I had my opponent within my sights right from the beginning. That didn’t only motivate me – I also always knew how I was doing with time. In contrast to two years ago, when I was leading, and almost messed up my whole winning margin.

Please give us an idea about the fate of a mountain biker in the Red Bull Dolomitenmann. With you guys, it’s not so much the muscles that are strained in the first few hours as the nerves, because you’re the last to run the race, and beforehand you can only passively share the excitement with your team-mates ...

When Helmut [Schiessl] began the race, I was still at home on the couch and had a leisurely breakfast, instead of letting myself get nervous at the location. But then I couldn’t resist listening to the live broadcast on the internet. That’s how I found out we were in the running for victory. It wasn’t until then that I got really nervous.

How did the team react when they found out that the paragliding category had to be cancelled due to dangerous weather conditions?

Disappointed because Christian [Amon] was our best man – he flew the best time overall when we won two years ago. We knew immediately that without him it would be very tight.

Did you have a tactical plan for your race that went beyond something like “peddle as fast as you can?”

In this race situation it wasn’t possible to use tactics: I wanted to only overtake Kristian Hynek as fast as possible, then before the summit, attack and make up time so that I didn’t have to risk too much going downhill. And that’s exactly how I did it in the end.

What made the mountainbike stage the challenge “for the toughest under the sun” – as the official Red Bull Dolomitenmann motto declares?

The brutally steep passages where you have to shoulder the bike and the crazy descent over the skiing slope that has an average gradient of 26 percent. We were able to choose whether to use the wrong bike either uphill or downhill. I chose it for the downhill and used a Hardtail, which although you can get ahead really quickly uphill with reaches its limits downhill. It didn’t matter, because you lose less time riding downhill than uphill.

How much did it help that you, coming from Lienz, have every stone and every surface of the circuit ingrained in your head and in your bones?

The race took place on my local mountain, yes, but the path is so brutal that I don’t train on it and have only checked it out twice before the race.

The Red Bull team had a series of bad luck: Markus Kröll was injured during the race, Harald Hudetz while warming up – and Roland Stauder raced with a very bad cold. How much did you all notice about the problems of the favorite team during the race?

I know Roland very well. He told me before that he was sick. If he’d been in top form, he would have definitely been my most feared opponent. Kröll’s accident I heard about on webradio, and that Hudetz was also injured I first heard at the finish line. Kudos to the physically disadvantaged team for coming fourth despite all that!

When the first Dolomitenmann was held 20 years ago you were only eight years old. Were you already lining the edge of the route back then?

Not when I was eight, but when I was 14. I’d just started biking then and I thought it was unbelievable how the pros took the downhill. I participated myself for the first time in 2001. Ever since then, I’d dreamed of winning a trophy. That I’ve got it now, after only participating four times, came about a bit too quickly. Now I’ll have to look for a new goal ...