Qualifying for a downhill World Cup is harder than it\u2019s ever been before. Finals fields are smaller and the racing is incredibly tight at the top. It\u2019s harder, unless your Asa Vermette.<\/p>\n
The young U.S. racer found time to throw a backflip into his qualifying run on Friday in Lenzerheide. And still went fastest. Frameworks Racing\u2019s junior set a time of 2:52.943. That put him fastest in the junior men\u2019s race, well ahead of French brothers, and recent world champion, Max and Till Alran.<\/p>\n
It also looked pretty damn cool.<\/p>\n
Vermette wasn\u2019t the only rider backflipping the Lenzerheide bridge this week. But he was defintiely the only one who was, erm, let\u2019s call it \u201cconfident\u201d enough to do it in a race run.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went pretty deep, I went to flat,\u201d Vermette admits. \u201cI probably lost a solid .8 seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once he was back right side up, the American admitted he was able to concentrate a bit more one racing than, you know, hitting mid-run tricks, adding \u201cI\u2019m pretty sure I turned on the GoPro\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
The U.S. racer is already making a career of defying expectations, though. He stepped out of this year\u2019s World Cup season to become the youngest-ever Red Bull Hardline winner<\/a>. That unseated Canada\u2019s own Jackson Goldstone from that title. Vermette nearly stole that record from the Canadian, who was absent from Hardline Wales, earlier in the year when the two went head-to-head at Hardline Maydena<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Qualifying for a downhill World Cup is harder than it\u2019s ever been before. Finals fields are smaller and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[81835,49,48,635,81836,81837,82,13009],"class_list":["post-155780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-asa-vermette","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-downhill-world-cup","tag-lenzerheide","tag-sports","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}