Vittoria Eastern States Cup: Killington East Coast Showdown #2 Results

In what has become one of the biggest two-wheeled parties on the East Coast, the traditional 4th of July weekend races at Killington Resort brought a huge crowd of racers to the largest ski resort in Eastern North America last weekend. This was the second double-the-fun event of the season as the mountain hosted the BOX Components East Coast Showdown for the Vittoria Eastern States Cup enduro and downhill tours. The BOX Components East Coast Showdown is a mini series within the Vittoria ESC that features both Enduro and Downhill races at the largest resorts on our schedule.

After a pleasant summery week, strong thunder storms rolled through the area on Friday night depositing up to two inches of rain. Race day was mostly sunny but the minor mud holes from practice day had swelled impressively.

The downhill event was contested first on Saturday and used the same track as last year on the Snowdon portion of the mountain. The course was a bit of a throwback to the early days of East coast racing with long, high-speed sections on ski trails interspersed with short technical sections in the woods.

The upper half of the track featured most of the autobahn sections with a mixture of work roads and ski trails.

Towards the bottom racers were faced with a challenging maze of slick roots, rock drops and an epic muddy bog. The showcase feature was a slabby rock pile that saw the elite racers throwing massive hucks-to-flat off the side of the rocks.

Lauren Daney continued her impressive string of wins, topping a solid field of pro racers by almost 28 seconds.

The women’ pro podium from left: Amy Alton-2nd, Lauren Daney-1st, Simona Croccolo-3rd

Ray Syron returned to his east coast roots to take the men’s pro race after a brief hiatus from the east coast scene. Syron beat runner-up Frederico Viera by just under two seconds.

The men’s pro podium form left: Jordan Newth-4th, Frederico Viera-2nd, Ray Syron-1st, Isaac Allaire-3rd, Steve Avery-5th

The enduro was contested on Sunday and featured five long, challenging stages. Killington enduros are the closest thing on the East coast to big mountain events with several nearly ten-minute-long stages. The event sold out with a huge field of racers battling under blue skies and temperatures comfortably in the 70s.

Racers got to enjoy some new terrain this year as Killington is developing a new zone on the Ram’s Head sector of the mountain. Stage One took racers on an epic romp through some Killington’s rowdy natural terrain before dropping into the still-under-construction Black Magic expert jump line with its truly massive berms.

Stage Two encompassed some of Killington’s most popular terrain on Cable Trail and Foxy Roxy.

Stage Three took racers down the southern flanks of the mountain and into a rarely-ridden region of the trail network.

Stage Four was entirely new and will be the site of the mountain’s first ProGRT downhill event in a few weeks.

Stage Five was a nearly top-to-bottom run off the iconic K-1 gondola and featured a huge variety of terrain from warp-speed double track, to rock slabs, to ski trails, to classic Vermont roots and rocks down a steeply forested mountainside.