Grab another cup and check out this week’s Monday Morning Coffee about what happened this weekend in Motocross and more…
By Billy Rainford
So far, every time I go away with Emily we come home to a snowstorm. Our return from Vancouver was no different. I’m currently typing away avoiding going outside to shovel the 8 inches of snow we received last night.
Our flight home from YVR kept getting delayed and when we looked at the forecast we were a little worried about the drive home from Toronto to London, if the storm they were predicting was going to become a reality.
We landed at YYZ to find zero snow. All the stuff we got when we returned from our cruise a few days earlier had melted away. Perfect. We grabbed our car from the Park ‘N Fly, which was the busiest I’ve ever seen it, and hit the highway for the 2-hour drive that would finally have us home.
You ever drive somewhere and have that one car that just won’t get away from you? We had that last night. I’m sure he’d been drinking for the Grey Cup (Congratulations Daryl Murphy and his Saskatchewan Roughriders) because there was swerving and up-and-down speed going on with them. And to top it off, they were sitting in the left lane while doing it! For some reason, this is maybe my biggest pet peeve of all. Oh, he also had hit bright lights on the entire time.
Back and forth we went as we drove along the bare and dry highway…until we hit Woodstock.
If you’ve been through winters in southwestern Ontario you know the stretch between Woodstock and London is notorious for winter weather problems and it’s exactly where our drive got a little crazy.
If we were living in a ski town we would have been calling in sick on Monday, but we aren’t. We were down to two thin tracks in the snow that was falling about as hard as snow can fall.
As for the idiot driver, we came up on another left lane driver, so I did the customary flash of the high beams and went around them on the right. Our previous idiot didn’t know how to get around them, so they both got in a bumper-to-bumper line and fell back. It was laughable how they stayed together like that as they disappeared in my rearview mirror.
A little past Woodstock and we were all going 50kph as the rear end of the VW Golf would try to take the lead from time to time. It was -1C making it a slippery, dangerous mess.
We made it home at around 2:00am Eastern time and unloaded the car and entered the house to our extremely excited Aussiedoodle, Olive. (Don’t worry, someone stayed at our place with her while we were gone.)
A message from our neighbour said we can never go away again because this snowstorm thing seems to happen every time we do. Well, I’m not going anywhere for 4 days… Mini O’s here we come!
The last time I was at a Vancouver Supercross was back in 2006 when I was still living in Kitsilano. I was involved with both MX Forum and Racer X Canada. What a time!
After having someone else attend the event for DMX in 2024, I told myself I wouldn’t miss another Supercross in Canada, so off we went.
I’ll cover the races in detail in its own column this afternoon, but I do want to mention a few things here in MMC.
After seeing the sparse crowds in 2005 and 2006, I never really imagined the most beautiful city in North America would get another chance to host it again, but here we are with the support of the FIM WSX crew and all the Canadians on the crew who made it a great event.
We had a real Supercross track with some real, top notch riders, in a huge building that saw a bunch of improvements since the last time I was there.
I went in with rather low expectations but will say that I left very impressed with how the whole thing went down. Kudos to everyone.
The dirt still had that weird “moon rock” look (glacial till…) with the grey and there were some rocks in it that had people grabbing and digging throughout the show, but I don’t think anyone can say it wasn’t a classic SX track.
Before the racing started, I could tell we were in for something bigger than I’ve seen in Vancouver by the size of the line-ups for the autograph sessions. In fact, the 250 and then the 450 sessions were only 30-minutes long each and many people didn’t have time to get through the line to actually meet the riders.
The most fun for me was hanging around by the main entrance before the racing started and meeting and chatting with Canadian moto fans. It’s been so long since I’ve been at a big race like this in Canada!
The list is of people is much too long which means ‘Faces at the Races‘ will be fun when I get to it.
We all know that Eli Tomac showed up as the defending WSX 450 (Sorry, SX1. We have electric Starks in here now!) champion on his first-ever ride on the Red Bull KTM. The only other rider who would have made this impact would have been an appearance by Haiden Deegan (YAM) on a 450.
Eli took the win over Ken Roczen (SUZ) and Jason Anderson (SUZ) which is what I think the biggest part of the crowd wanted to see. I keep track of this stuff at all the opening ceremonies I see over the season and the top 3 cheers go out to Eli, Haiden, and Aaron Plessinger every round.
The track was a little “off” on Friday when riders got the chance to ride it for Press Day, but they made the necessary changes and it had a much better flow when racing started on Saturday.
Again, I’ll talk about all this in another column.
It could be argued that the most exciting racing of the night was between Canadian #2 Cole Thompson (Bud Racing Kawasaki) and #43 Cullin Park (Moto Concepts Honda) in the SX2 class.
Brad Nemeth and I were running around trying to not to miss any of the action. I missed a bunch but I hope Brad was a little more successful.
#39 Noah Viney was the other Canadian on the line for the Moto Concepts Honda team.
2025 FIM WSX Round 2 Results and Points from Vancouver Canada
Guillaume St Cyr in Estonia
Guillaume St Cyr from Victoriaville, Quebec, was in Estonia for the Tallinn Supercross. He raced in Stuttgart Germany last week and wasn’t happy with his results, but felt better this week. We spoke to him briefly after Germany but decided to wait until after Estonia for our podcast interview, so watch for that later today.
NIGHT 1 – FRIDAY
- Harri Kullas
- Jeremy Hand
- Anton Nordstrom
- Tanel Leok
- Joan Cros
- Mairis Pumpurs
- Miro Varjonen
- Adam Chatfield
- Kaarel Tilk
- Guillame St-Cyr
NIGHT 2 – SATURDAY
- Harri Kullas
- Mairis Pumpurs
- Jeremy Hand
- Tanel Leok
- Luke Kalatzian
- Joan Cros
- Kaarel Tilk
- Guilame St-Cyr
- Erki Kahro
- Adam Chatfield
AMA Endurocross Round 5 in Reno, NV
| EX PRO Overall Positions | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st#22 |  | JONNY WALKER GREAT BRITAIN, NA | Moto 1:1st Moto 2:1st Moto 3:1st |
| 2nd#1 |  | TRYSTAN HART INVERMERE, BC | Moto 1:2nd Moto 2:2nd Moto 3:3rd |
| 3rd#513 |  | RYDER LEBLOND NEW FLORENCE, PA | Moto 1:6th Moto 2:3rd Moto 3:2nd |
| 4th#10 |  | COLTON HAAKER COEUR D ALENE, ID | Moto 1:3rd Moto 2:5th Moto 3:4th |
| 5th#2 |  | CODY WEBB INDIAN HILLS, CA | Moto 1:4th Moto 2:4th Moto 3:7th |
| 6th#15 |  | MAX GERSTON NEW RIVER, AZ | Moto 1:5th Moto 2:6th Moto 3:5th |
| 7th#99 | | BRANDEN PETRIE TOMAHAWK, AB | Moto 1:8th Moto 2:8th Moto 3:6th |
| 8th#96 | | TIM APOLLE FINNE, NA | Moto 1:7th Moto 2:12th Moto 3:8th |
| 9th#575 | | NICK THOMPSON GOSHEN, UT | Moto 1:9th Moto 2:7th Moto 3:11th |
| 10th#110 | | JADEN DAHNERS ENUMCLAW, WA | Moto 1:10th Moto 2:9th Moto 3:9th |
| 11th#10x | | NIKO PIAZZA DALTON GARDENS, ID | Moto 1:12th Moto 2:10th Moto 3:12th |
| 12th#56 |  | MARC FERNANDEZ BARCELONA, NA | Moto 1:14th Moto 2:11th Moto 3:10th |
| 13th#55 | | JAMES FLYNN POST FALLS, ID | Moto 1:11th Moto 2:13th Moto 3:13th |
| 14th#6 |  | TY CULLINS PHOENIX, AZ | Moto 1:13th Moto 2:14th Moto 3:14th |
Canadians did well in Reno. Full results HERE.
OK, I’m out of time. Thanks for reading and watch for all the coverage from Vancouver later today. My plan was to sit here and let the snow melt, but it looks like I may have to go outside and do something about it after all.
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