Colleague Steffen Kanduth has already explained here that Red Bull Hardline sets the benchmark in terms of the difficulty of the course. All the more impressive that a handful of women tackled the course, which is also extremely dangerous, especially with its extremely long doubles in the last part of the course.

Two women qualified for the full run on the last day of the event, Gracey Hemstreet (CDN) and Erice von Leuven (NZL). In the final training they rode the whole course and that proved to be the 18-year-old New Zealander's undoing.

At Creek Gap, where the take-off and landing are 24 meters apart, she came up short and crashed into the landing hill, was thrown off and rolled over several times. At first, she only complained of pain in her wrist, says photographer Sven Martin, who witnessed the fall at close quarters.

It later transpired that much more was broken on the two-time junior downhill world champion: she had fractures to her neck and back vertebrae as well as several internal injuries, including a punctured lung, she listed in an online interview in her hospital bed. Not forgetting her broken wrist. According to Sven Martin, she even got up after the fall and had a quad bike take her to the finish area.

Heice had successfully jumped the Creek Gap twice before. However, as Sven Martin explains in a video podcast, it is a different matter to jump the biggest jumps at the end of the course or to do so after you have already covered the entire upper part of the course in your body.

"The riders and some of the riders had a motorcycle pull them up to the necessary speed in training to make the big jumps." Thanks to speed measurements, they knew that 74 km/h was needed to make it to the landing. "But you have slipstream behind the bike. Without this, it can be difficult to maintain speed." In addition, the riders had to catch the series of shark fin jumps before the creek gap perfectly in order to be fast enough.

Erice also had her speed measured with the radar gun during training and was warned if she wasn't riding fast enough towards the jump. This was not the case in the final training session, she was a little too slow and had no chance of flying far enough. "I saw that she wasn't fast enough and just hoped that she would somehow pull herself into the landing," said Martin in the podcast, describing his thoughts immediately before the crash.

Where Erice van Leuven lost the crucial km/h, or whether she was going fast enough at all, can no longer be determined in retrospect. "I'm glad I can still walk," she says in her hospital bed, wedged into an orthosis that immobilizes her head and spine. As soon as her lungs have healed, she can fly home from Tasmania to recover from further injuries. The interviewer wants to know whether she will ride the Red Bull Hardline again. Her answer: "Of course I will."

The huge talent from New Zealand would like to make a comeback like Jackson Goldstone did in the race that was her undoing (and his a year earlier). Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that Erice van Leuven does not overdo it with the risk-taking and can continue to enjoy life and mountain biking for a long time to come.