The final week of the Crankworx Summer Series is about to kick off at Silver Star Resort tomorrow. Today seems an appropriate time to look back at the second week of competition that’s just wrapped up at Kicking Horse resort in Golden, BC. Kona Gravity riders Rhys Verner and Miranda Miller backed up their solid first week performances and now sit in third and fourth in the series respectively. Let’s take a quick look back and see how they got there.

The Enduro was the first event of the week and Miranda made jokes about the brutal rocky section giving her “PTSD flashbacks of Zermatt”. Miranda spent the day locked in a battle with eventual first-place finisher ALN, in the end only 0.03 seconds would separate the two of them.

Rhys took yet another third place. The day didn’t start off the best though, he crashed early on stage one and made another costly mistake later on in the same stage to finish in 10th. “I knew I was fast, but I needed to cut out the mistakes in order to claw back a good position. Stages two and three were fairly smooth and fast, and I ended up tied for 3rd going into the last stage.”
With the pressure on Rhys held it together and found the perfect balance of speed and consistency and slotted comfortably into third place.

The second event of the event had been kept on the down-low but as soon as photos started trickling out, the hype was real. The Crankworx Summer Series athletes would be racing the Mt Seven Psychosis. The legendary BC race, made famous in the Anthill film, Seasons. The start chute into Dead Dog trail is near-vertical and scares even the world’s best riders.

Squamish local Rhys Verner is no stranger to steep trails backed up his strong performance in the Enduro and finished the insanely physical race in third place, while Miranda had to settle for fifth in the tightly contested women’s field.
After advancing the to the round of eight in the Dual Slalom, Rhys found himself up against eventual race winner Lucas Cruz and was knocked out. In the women’s event, Miranda would advance to the round of four where she would remain, finishing the day in fourth place.
The final event of the week for our two Kona Gravity Athletes would be the Kicking Horse DH. Miranda Miller struggled to connect and remember the track from practice but she overcame those issues to finish in third place “I  still manage to get about four times more nervous for a DH run than anything else… but that’s why it’s the best!” ⁣

In the men’s field, Rhys put down a stormer of a run, besting many of BC’s DH specialists, in the end, it was fellow Sea to Sky resident and Enduro superstar Jesse Melamed that took the win but Rhys would stand on the podium in second place, finishing off another epic week of racing.