Rom Aker­son and Les­ley Pater­son win XTERRA World Cham­pi­onship

The 2018 XER­RA World Cham­pi­onship at Maui/Hawaii has been his­to­ry since 28.10.2018. In the end, Rom Aker­son from Cos­ta Rica and Les­ley Pater­son from Scot­land won the World Cham­pi­onship title in the tough­est off-road con­di­tions. The deci­sion for the men was pret­ty close. In the end, how­ev­er, last year’s win­ner Bradley Weiss didn’t man­age to take the lead from the Cos­ta Rican at the final 10km trail run. With only 35 sec­onds the South African had to admit defeat. Aker­son final­ly man­aged best with the track con­di­tions (strong waves, mud on MTB track) and had the best over­all pack­age with­out set­ting the best time in one dis­ci­pline. Bradley Weiss lost the World Cham­pi­onship title with a rather weak per­for­mance in the swim split, the valu­able sec­onds were miss­ing in the end for his title defence. It was also aston­ish­ing that Ruben Ruzafa (ESP), the expe­ri­enced run­ner lead­ing up to the split, was inter­cept­ed by 3 ath­letes on the run­ning track and “passed” on 4th place. The New Zealan­der Osborne also showed until the end that he always has to be reck­oned with. With the best swim split and a fast trail run he secured 3rd place.

It was not so close with the women. Les­ley Pater­son from Scot­land deliv­ered a con­vinc­ing race with the best bike split and the best run­ning split. In the end she crossed the fin­ish line with a lead of more than 10 min­utes to Michelle Flipo (MEX). 3rd place went to Liz Orchard from New Zealand. The race was not so opti­mal for the XTERRA Euro­pean Cham­pi­on Brigit­ta Poor (HUN). She could not and did not want to be sat­is­fied with 5th place. But she says her­self that “mud races” are not her favourite races. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, like the Aus­tri­an Cari­na Wasle (6th place), she had to strug­gle with tech­ni­cal prob­lems on her bike. But with a view to 2019, she is a fight­er…

More infor­ma­tion about XTERRA World Cham­pi­onship can be found here.