mbr:
Congratulations Charlie! It’s nearly a week after winning the Worlds at Fort William, has it sunk in yet?

Charlie Hatton:
Yes it’s definitely changed things a lot for me. It’s been a crazy, crazy few days. I finally got back yesterday, but it’s been amazing and I’m trying to let it soak in still, I guess.

mbr:
World Champion is a long way from the Forest of Dean (when we first met you as a kid, sessioning the jumps on the GBU trail).

CH:
Yeah, I must have been six, seven, eight, something like that! I grew up in the Forest of Dean, riding with my brothers after school and the friends that lived in that village, and my uncle and cousins rode too. It was quite a big mountain bike family.
I did used to play other sports, I played rugby, cricket, football… but then at the weekends it was getting a bit hectic. So I’d be playing football on the Saturday, then I’d ride my bike and then I played rugby on the Sunday and it was getting a bit too much. I was like, right, I need to make a choice here and I love mountain biking.

mbr:
So glad you made that choice. Were you amazing on the bike straight away, did you win your first race?

CH:
No, definitely not, there were a few other guys I was racing against that would regularly beat me. I remember going into my first ever National race as a juvenile, I got second, which I thought was mint! But the guy who beat me did it by 16 seconds. I remember saying to my dad on the way home, I’m never going to beat that kid.

mbr:
There’s a lot of pressure to do well as a junior, but I guess you’ve proved that you don’t need to win at every level to make it to the top?

CH:
I think it varies massively in different people. I went down the generic path – from a really young age I raced as soon as I could, built my way up through the ranks and then now I guess I’m here. Whereas my teammate Andy, he didn’t start riding bikes till he was 16 or 17, instead he was skiing and doing winter sports, then he started really focusing on the mountain biking. He was there at the World Cups as a privateer.

mbr:
Did having Andy win the World Cup at Leogang help you and the team at Fort William?

CH:
Yeah, 100 percent. Our team is awesome. The vibe and the atmosphere in our pits is great and quite different. We all meet up and go out for food, and we’re good friends outside of racing, which is brilliant. You travel around the world with some of your best friends and in that environment that’s where you can do well. Everyone really wants to be there and the Leogang win elevated everyone’s performance.

Me and Andy, we get on really well, I’ll go and stay at his house for a couple of weeks and we’ll just ride and train together. You don’t often see two teammates fully try lines against each other, but we do.

It’s quite funny, but at night Andy and I will be sitting in our beds together – sounds a bit weird but it’s not! – and have the footage from the GoPros on our laptops and we’ll run them together and just really dissect the track. It pushes us both on.

The best thing is though, at the end of the day, if I beat him or he beats me, we’re both absolutely stoked for each other.

mbr:
So when he won at Leogang, did that make you think you could too?

CH:
Last year Andy was on the podium a lot and I was just outside it. But I almost knew it was coming because I knew the equipment’s there, and on the day I can ride as fast as Andy, so it was trusting the process really. I knew it was coming soon, I just had to keep cracking on.

Charlie Hatton performs at UCI DH World Championships in Fort William, Scotland on August 05, 2023. Photo credit: Bartek Wolinski / Red Bull Content Pool

mbr:
What takes you from top-20 to the top step?

CH:
That’s a tough question to answer. Last weekend when I was doing my run, I never would have thought that it would be a World Champs winning run. But it obviously was. I was carrying great speed everywhere and perfectly online. And I was just really clean. On that track, as soon as you make a slight mistake, there’s such long straits that you just lose all your time.
But what changes from top 20 to top 10 to World Champion? I don’t know! There’s so many little things that add up, and so many variables.

mbr:
Do you get much help at the Worlds? More than for other races, with input from Team GB?

CH:
Yeah, we had actually quite a lot of people up the hill, Joe Breedon, we drafted him in, he was brilliant. We also had Katie Curd from British Cycling and Innes Graham and Andy Barlow from Dirt School. So every night they send in their footage and reviews of which lines were faster, it was brilliant actually.

mbr:
So do you know your lines pretty much straight away, because you know the track so well, then tweak them as the week goes along?

CH:
Yeah, we walked the track on the Wednesday looking at every single rock, taking photos all the way down so I can just study them at night. Then it’s chopping the track down into smaller sections you can later start to link together.

Then the section I want to focus on I think, right, really try and focus on where you want the wheels to be, where to go.

So almost by track or day, you can pretty much run the track like almost memorising it in your head and just like visualising it as you would go down. In the morning I’ll do 10-15 minutes on the turbo, then I’ll just shut my eyes and go through the track in my head. And then I’ll do the same before I warm up for my race run as well. It’s like a fun extra practice run, it does help.

mbr:
How were you before the race? Quietly confident or scared to death?

CH:
Not exactly nervous, but I just really struggle to eat. I can’t eat anything. But I’ve got some good ideas for that from people, drinking smoothies and putting oats in there. But then as soon as I start to warm up I’m thinking, this is go time now, and the nerves subside as soon as I sit in the start gate. I’m warmed up. I’m ready. I’ve done everything. I can enjoy it and do what I love doing.

mbr:
Will being World Champion make that easier or harder, do you think?

CH:
I’m not sure! This sport is a very confidence building sport. So to look down and see the rainbow stripes I’ll think, well, I can do it again.
But I’m probably particularly bad at not believing in myself, I try not to set myself goals. I don’t want to not reach them because it feels like failure. So maybe I need to change my mindset slightly to think more like – I’m gonna go into this thing and I’m gonna win it.

mbr
Any tips for young riders out there who want to be World Champions one day?

CH:
It depends where you are in the sport, but I’d say having a skills base is much more important than any cardio. Taking a skills coaching session sessioning different sections to try and get more confidence on the bike, rather than the fitness side of it.
Then the further up you get and the higher level you are, fitness starts to play into the equation more and it’s definitely going to help you ride and it’s never gonna be a bad thing to be fitter.