There was excellent weather for the 550 or so cyclists who raced up the Mount Washington Auto road on Saturday.
Victoria De Savino beat out her competition by 7 minutes, summiting the Mount Washington auto road 1 hour and 7 minutes. She is 37 and from Buffalo, NY. Eneas Freyre, 40 and of Norwalk, CT finished in 52 minutes, more than two minutes faster than the mens’ second-place finisher.
General Manager Howie Weyms says neither DiSavino nor Freyre broke a record for the Auto Road Hillclimb, but, he says, “both the male and female record are a little bit controversial. There’s a pretty big segment of the bicycling competition world that thinks they may have been set during times when there were a lot of performance enhancing drugs being used.”
The Mount Washington Auto road Hillclimb is known as one of the toughest in the world, at 7.6 miles long, with a 22 percent grade sprint to the finish.