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Trek-VW team rider Jeremiah Bishop won this year’s Firecracker 50 race in Breckenridge, CO, earning the 32-year old Virginian this year’s U.S. National Marathon Mountain Bike Championship, and taking home his first-ever U.S. national title. As he crossed the finish line in what turned out to be a bizarre and bewildering event that saw a number of race favorites abandon, no one was more surprised than Bishop that he had won.
“I was hoping I had gotten top-five, maybe,” Bishop said at the finish line. “I had no idea why people were spraying me in the face with beer and jumping on me. But after a second or two it started to make sense.”
Bishop’s confusion was understandable given his own hectic race. Rolling out in front of 8,000 people as part of Breckenridge’s Independence Day Parade, Bishop surged into the lead only to suffer a bent chain, bent derailleur hanger, and three broken spokes at the 35-mile mark. As Bishop stopped to coble together his damaged bike—breaking the chain to remove a link, bending back the derailleur hanger, and tweaking the broken spokes to make the wheel spin—the entire pro men’s field rolled by.
“I was thinking, 'that’s the race' — maybe I could get back into the top-10,” Bishop recalled.
But Bishop was not alone in the bad luck department. Defending marathon champion Jay Henry abandoned earlier in the race, just minutes into the first climb, after getting tangled up in a crash with Trek-VW’s Brian Smith. Ryan Trebon, Bishop’s main rival, left midway through the first lap due to exhaustion. Ross Schnell, Bishop’s teammate, was then next rider to abandon, leaving Andy Schultz, Dave Wiens, Evan Plews, and Michael McCalla as the riders to catch. Schultz, the 2005 U23 national champ, enjoyed a comfortable lead before suffering a flat that would force his abandonment. Wiens flatted next as Bishop chased down and passed McCalla, leaving only Plews ahead. Despite his dogged determination, as he watched Plews start the final descent to the finish line, it appeared Bishop’s charge would be too little, too late. But just minutes from the line, Plews suffered a rear tire flat that gave Bishop the gap he needed to take a win a race that he didn’t even know he’d won…until the rest of his Trek-VW teammates sprayed him down with PBR.
