One of the toughest mountain bike races of all takes place in Wales next weekend.<\/p>\n
Hardline Wales is a part-downhill, part-freeride race which will be staged in Machynlleth on 26-27 July.<\/p>\n
According to the organisers, Hardline riders “push their limits to conquer a brutal course with massive jumps, drops and technical challenges”.<\/p>\n
Kaos Seagrave, a London-born professional rider who is based in Wales, has many years of biking experience under his belt but says Hardline Wales “is actually the hardest race I’ve ever done”.<\/p>\n
Seagrave devotes his time to freeride mountain biking having left racing on the World Cup scene after finding races “too serious”.<\/p>\n
Hardline is the only race the 26-year-old still competes in, and also tests for, as he feels it is the only race that gives the racers the chance to have fun while racing.<\/p>\n
“The good thing about Hardline is you get to race and be competitive. It’s like playing Mario Kart with your mates,” Seagrave said.<\/p>\n
Though he was born in the UK, Seagrave, along with his professional racing sister Tahnee, grew up near Morzine in France – the gateway to the Portes du Soleil area that mountain bikers flock to in summer, and skiers in winter.<\/p>\n
When the siblings were younger, the family often had athletes staying with them.<\/p>\n
“I was at the races all my life,” said Seagrave. <\/p>\n
“Before I was a racer, my family would always be at the races because my mum would cook for some of the teams.”<\/p>\n
The Seagraves eventually left France for Wales, where they have lived and raced for 10 years.<\/p>\n
Kaos says he “fell in love with the place” after visiting his sister, who had moved over first.<\/p>\n
In Morzine there was no opportunity for biking in winter, meaning that \u2013 unusually perhaps – the Welsh weather was appealing.<\/p>\n
“We wanted to always just ride bikes and you can’t with winter out there [in France],” Seagrave said.<\/p>\n
“Here you can ride 12 months of the year. It’s just so beautiful.”<\/p>\n
The Seagraves are not alone, with Wales’ landscape attracting many elite racing families in recent times.<\/p>\n
“The riding is insane, the amount of hills and wherever you go there’s kind of a track there,” Seagrave added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the toughest mountain bike races of all takes place in Wales next weekend. Hardline Wales is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-11655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}