A 17-year-old from Palmerston North has won the junior men’s downhill World Cup series with two rounds of the season still to run, and he has done it as the first New Zealand man to take an overall downhill title.
Jonty Williamson won the junior men’s final at Les Gets in the French Alps on Saturday, the seventh round of the nine round WHOOP UCI Mountain Bike World Series. It was his sixth win from seven starts this season, and the points banked put the series out of reach of everyone behind him.
The win came on a track that changed underneath the riders. Les Gets sits above the Portes du Soleil valley in Haute Savoie and the weekend was hammered by rain after a dry practice, leaving the top of the hill greasy and the bottom half somewhere in between.
“The track went from dry practice to completely wet – and sort of in the middle today which made it tricky to choose tyres and quite difficult,” Williamson told Cycling New Zealand.
Tyre choice in downhill racing is close to a one way bet. Riders get one run, the course is between two and three kilometres of rock, root and off camber dirt, and a compound that grips in the wet costs speed everywhere the track has dried out. Williamson picked well enough to hold off Malik Boatwright of Queenstown by 0.236 seconds, which over a run of about three minutes is about the length of a bike.
Boatwright has now finished second to Williamson four times this season and sits second overall, more than 20 points clear of third. Camden Rutherfurd of Taranaki was seventh on the day and is seventh in the standings. Indy Deavoll of Queenstown was eighth in the junior women’s final and holds fifth overall.
“It feels pretty cool to be the first kiwi to win a DH overall title. It hasn’t sunk in yet but I am sure it will,” Williamson said.
New Zealand’s first overall downhill World Cup title actually arrived two years ago, when Erice van Leuven took the junior women’s series in 2024 alongside back to back junior world championship wins in Glasgow and Andorra. Williamson is the first New Zealand man to manage it, in a discipline where the country has produced fast riders for two decades without ever landing a season long crown on the men’s side. Sam Blenkinsop won New Zealand’s first downhill World Cup race back in 2008 and finished fifth overall that season.
Williamson rides for the Yeti Fox Factory team and has been building towards this all season. In June he won at Lenzerheide in Switzerland by nearly four seconds, his fourth straight junior men’s World Cup win, which was a record for consecutive victories in the grade.
“I am pretty stoked with how I sent today. It feels pretty unreal to go four in a row. I didn’t really expect that coming into the season,” he said at the time, in comments published by Cycling New Zealand in June.
The wider New Zealand result sheet at Les Gets says something about how deep the country has become in gravity racing. In the elite men’s final Lachie Stevens-McNab of Rotorua was 11th, Oli Clark of Kaikōura 12th and Luke Wayman of Christchurch 17th. In the elite women’s final Eliana Hulsebosch of Tauranga was 11th and Jenna Hastings of Rotorua 14th. Hulsebosch stepped up to the elite grade this year after a debut junior season in 2024 that included a win at Val di Sole where she went faster than the elite field.
That is nine New Zealanders inside the top 20 of their respective finals across four categories at a single World Cup round, from Palmerston North, Queenstown, Taranaki, Rotorua, Kaikōura, Christchurch and Tauranga. For a sport that costs a fortune to travel for and runs almost entirely on the other side of the world from June to October, that is a lot of riders getting to the start line and staying there.
The elite races at Les Gets went to the home crowd and to a rider Williamson will run into soon enough. Max Alran, who won the junior men’s overall title in 2025, took his first elite World Cup win by 1.65 seconds from Andreas Kolb of Austria, with Jackson Goldstone of Canada third. Hattie Harnden of Britain won the elite women’s race by 1.2 seconds from Marine Cabirou of France, with Vali Höll of Austria third, on a bike using a belt driven gearbox rather than a conventional derailleur.
Two rounds of the season remain, so Williamson can now race for wins rather than points. The junior grade in downhill runs to under 19, which means he has time in the category before the step up to elite, where the same three minutes is raced by professionals a decade older with a decade more of track knowledge. The world championships are the other target still on the calendar, and that is a single run on a single day rather than a season of consistency, which is a different test again.
The result was reported by RNZ on Sunday. Williamson’s season now reads six wins, one second place, and a title wrapped up in the rain in the Alps with two rounds to spare.
Have you followed New Zealand’s downhill riders this season, or ridden the tracks that produced them? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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