UCI Mountain Bike World Championships 1996 - Broadcast Opening Sequence

Copyright (c) 1996 Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) Sanctioned by the Union Cycliste Internationale, or the UCI, the Mountain Bike World Championships is the prestigious world championship competition for mountain bike racing in the disciplines of cross country, downhill, and four-cross. The Championships was launched in 1990 at Durango, Colorado in the US, and it featured only cross-country and downhill races. Unlike other UCI-sanctioned mountain-bike races, the competitors in this event represent their countries rather than commercial teams. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — A few months after mountain biking took centerstage in its debut as an official medal sport at the Atlanta Olympics, the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships goes down under as Cairns in Queensland, Australia played host to the event's seventh edition from 18 to 19 September 1996, and this was the very first time that the MTB Worlds have travelled outside of either North America or Europe. In these championships, Olympic silver medalists Thomas Frischknecht of Switzerland and Canada's Alison Sydor have pocketed home world titles in their respective men's and women's cross-country races, while an 18-year-old Anne-Caroline Chausson of France, a three-time titleholder in the junior's downhill race, kept on adding her name onto the books through her first World Championship gold in her senior career.