King and queen of hill crowned

PARK CITY — The course was one of the fastest Michal Prokop had ever raced on. The World Cup mountain bike champion had seen plenty of speedy descents, but the Y-Cross track built on the hillside at The Canyons impressed the veteran racer from the Czech Republic.

"I liked it," Prokop said after beating Jared Graves of Australia for the win in the first leg of the Jeep King of the Mountain series. "It was structured different. But it was one of the fastest I've ever ridden a bike on."

Prokop, though, needed every bit of that fast course to claim the first race in the three-race series. Battling head-to-head against opponents with the best combined time from two races moving the winner into the next round, Prokop found himself trailing Graves by almost two-tenths of a second after the first race in the finals.

But a whole-shot advantage out of the starter's gate held up down the course, and Prokop picked up the come-from-behind win.

Jill Kintner, also a world champion, took care of business in the women's race and wasn't seriously challenged as she took out all three of her opponents with relative ease.

"You can never really get comfortable with these girls," she said. "You might be in front, but you can hear their wheels right behind you and you know you can't let up."

Kintner, from Seattle, beat Arizona's Melissa Buhl in the finals.

While the winners each grabbed the lion's share of the $33,000 purse and a bundle of points toward winning a new Jeep Liberty to be awarded to the series winner, a pair of local racers gave their best shot at earning a spot on the final podium.

Chris Van Dine and Gale Dahleger, Park City residents, were both eliminated in the first round by world-champion caliber opponents, but still managed to post some impressive times.

"This was so much fun," Van Dine said. "I had a shorter line on the first berm, but he (Graves) was just so fast I didn't have much of a chance to stay with him."

Dahleger, who hadn't had a serious downhill race in three years after several years of top-flight competition, dusted off her body armor to show off in front of the home crowd.

"It was worth coming out of retirement for this," she said after pushing Buhl to the limit in her opening-round races. "I never get in the gate not believing I have a chance. So I gave it all I had and I made her stay on top of it all the way."

The races featured lots of fast descents, but also had their share of wipeouts and crashes. The scariest came in women's semifinals when Buhl and Tara Llanes crossed tires shortly after the parallel courses merged. Both cyclists crashed, but Llanes went sailing off the course and landed hard on a pile of rocks. After several minutes on the ground, she hobbled off the course and remounted her bike to attack her opponent in the consolation finals but ended up in fourth.

The event was part of a $100,000 series and will be televised on CBS in a tape-delayed manner on Aug. 18.

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E-mail: jeborn@desnews.com