Martha Hucker interviews Emmeline Ragot about her summer in New Zealand

 

 

French National Champ and 2008 World Cup number 4 Emmeline Ragot took a year out of studying and spent her winter following the sun to New Zealand. She arrived in October and bought a van to get around the country to race and make the most of NZ’s riding opportunities. In a December race miles from anywhere, with 40 minutes driving on forestry roads up into the mountains near Nelson, Emmeline met Martha Hucker writer Rita Langley. The two riders ended up traveling the national series together, with Emmeline teaching Rita to ride faster in exchange for Rita teaching Emmeline English. Right before Emmeline left they finally recorded the video  interview at the bottom of this article, and mashed it together with a whole load of random footage from the summer.

 

 

Emmeline’s been riding since she was twelve, when a family friend invited her to join the local mountain bike club. Like most young riders in France she started out competing at xc, dh and trials all on the same bike, and is quite happy riding uphills and hopping all over stuff as well as charging down. DH was the most fun, and she chose to concentrate on that – an inconvenient choice since her home in Bordeaux is hours from the nearest good DH tracks. But she was fast, and started racing World Cups as soon as she was old enough. She’s been Junior World Champ twice, and since stepping up to Elite she has ranked 4th in the world three years in a row, as well as finishing 3rd at the 2008 World Champs. She currently races for the Suspension Center team on a Turner bike, and will be doing some 4x as well as DH in the 2009 season.

 

Unfortunately there’s not a lot of race footage – the problem with having riders make videos about other riders is that when there’s a race on there’s no-one to do the filming! If you want to check out Emmeline’s riding style, watch her run at the 2008 World Champs here on Freecaster.

Thanks to Faster Pussycat Kill Kill for the music, they are a Wellington two-piece who perform regularly and have an EP out soon. Thanks also to Andrea + family from Chch and Indri and Fraser from Queenstown for filming some of the footage (and accomodation!).

Older: Pietermaritzburg National DH results (South Africa)

Fresher: Martha Hucker interviews Mio Suemasa

Published on 07/04/2009 by Martha Hucker.

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