Camille Balanche has had a tough few months. On SRF, she talks about speech problems, recurring headaches for months and the two weeks after her violent fall in Andorra, of which she has no memory. Ride tells Camille that her body, especially her thorax, was also in pain and still is. Nevertheless, despite her traumatic brain injury, her sensory processing and reflexes were never impaired.

She had to wait longer than she had imagined before returning to mountain biking. But she has been back on the trails and downhill routes since December. And she's getting faster and faster: she recently won a race, the Descente Des Roches in the Vosges mountains. 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Camille Balanche (@cam.bal)

"That was cool, but you can't compare this race with a World Cup race," she says on the phone. The biggest difference is that a World Cup course changes much more during training and the qualifying runs and constantly presents the racers with new challenges. Camille likes it that way: "Personally, I much prefer World Cup courses to the courses I usually ride."

She wants to find out where she stands compared to the world's best at the first World Cup race in Fort William at the beginning of May. "The physical values are exactly the same as a year ago," she says, but then qualifies: "In terms of confidence, I'm not quite at 100 percent, but my head is almost no longer a problem." Crucially, she has full clearance from the doctors to ride downhill races at the highest level.

Her goals are the same as every year, she says. For the most successful female downhill biker Switzerland has ever had, that can only mean one thing: competing for victory. "The first World Cup is a test. Maybe I'll have to adjust my goals then." The most important thing - seen from the outside - is that Camille is back, which was not clear from the start after her brutal crash in Andorra. However, only she herself knows whether Camille is satisfied with just being there.