Watch Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesjå ride the replica Rio track she built to train for the Olympics
Now that's commitment
Now that's commitment
Four time cross country World Champion and Olympic gold medal winner Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesjå has build a replica of the Rio cross country track to practice for the 2016 Olympics.
Flesjå travelled to Rio in October along with her team to bring back measurements of the course. She also used a 360 degree camera while riding so she could document every detail of the trail.
On her return home to Norway she recruited a team of volunteers who have put in a total of 1,000 hours to recreating elements of the Rio course in Sandnes. Flesjå is hoping that the course will help her to replicate her gold-medal-winning success from the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
The track was opened on Friday and you can see a video of Flesjå riding the track here with Tour de France cyclist Alexander Kristoff. It doesn’t look as steep as the Rio track but maintains a number of the same features such as tricky rock gardens and small doubles.
Despite being 42-years-old, Flesjå is the reigning Marathon World Champion and finished second in the World Cup overall this year behind Yolanda Neff.
With this amount of preparation she will be one of the favourites for the Olympic gold next year, however the conditions will no doubt be drastically different in Rio compared to Norway and she has also said she does not consider the Rio course to be “proper mountain biking”.