At its heart, the Prospector MTB is a grassroots event, born from a passion for mountain biking and trails in the Central Otago hills.
But the three-stage mountain-biking race is attracting an elite crowd of riders to Alexandra and quickly becoming a must-do event.
The third and final day of competition wrapped up at the Matangi Station woolshed yesterday. More than 160 riders tackled nearly 60km of steep climbs, technical descents and rocks.
Race director and co-founder Jimmy Williamson said riders had a "pretty intense" opening to the weekend with the short and sharp prologue on Friday, followed by stage one across Earnscleugh Station on Saturday.
"It’s been an amazing weekend. Every year we get to this day and everyone has got such buzz."
Racing had been tight right across the categories.
"We’ve always pitched the race [as] not an easy race, there’s no two ways about that — the nature of the course just defines it, you can’t dumb it down.
"The beauty of that [is] it does attract those elite guys — they look for a challenge, they are wanting to test themselves on the hardest courses they can."
In the elite men’s, it was team Julbo-Akatrax duo Craig Oliver and Ethan Rose who claimed the top title in 6hr 25min 22sec.
In the women’s, Priscilla Thompson and Mary Gray had a clean sweep of stage wins, despite Gray being a last-minute call up to the team.
Clyde local Samara Sheppard and Australian partner Kyle Ward continued their domination of the mixed team category, winning in 7hr 44min 53sec.
