with a technical hill ; Roper took an unfortunate five-point penalty right out of the gate , dropping him to the bottom of the leaderboard , a position that would take him over a full loop to climb out of .
With a 15-point first loop , GasGas ’ s Daniel Blanc-Gonnet had a solid hold on second place . Roper was able to significantly improve his score on loop 2 , taking only six points to Blanc-Gonnet ’ s 12 and overtaking his teammate ; they would hold these positions throughout the rest of the day .
“ Overall , I ' m really happy with my scores ,” said Smage . “ Besides one section , I had one really dumb mistake in number eight on the first loop . It was one of the hardest sections , one of the longer sections . And I got set up for the first obstacle , which was not that difficult , but I couldn ' t quite find my balance . And I felt like I was taking too long and just took off and fived it on the entrance rock . So that hurt . And I figured it would be hard to come back from that , but I managed to turn it around for the most part and just have four single dabs after that . I was really , really happy with that , given the sections . There were some tricky ones and , and just different terrain that I don ' t spend a lot of time riding .”
“ Today was honestly quite difficult for me ,” said Roper . “ I really struggled my first lap . I had two
VOL . 7 ISSUE 6 - JUNE 2022 // PAGE 97