Kelan enjoyed an ‘electric’ first season with new team

When Kelan Grant first began his mountainbiking journey there were no official trails in his local forest park but that didn’t stop him forging a path in the professional ranks of the sport and he now has a track in the Gortin Glens named in his honour.

The 31-year-old, from Omagh, has been competing in the UCI Enduro World Cup series since 2018 when he turned pro with the Chain Reactions Mavic team on the back of winning the Red Bull Fox Hunt for the first time the previous season.

Since then he continued to ride for the team, under various different guises, impressing on Nukeproof machinery until that brand went bust at the end of last year.

Before that news broke, Grant had already put pen to paper on a deal to move from the normal Enduro World Cup to the E-Enduro World Cup, embracing battery powered machinery under the Rotwild Schwalbe Gravity Team banner.

The Rotwild name won’t mean much to those of us in Ireland, but across Europe it’s ‘massive’ and Grant is pleased to be part of the German outfit’s return to racing.

“It was a brand new team, with new people but they were all very welcoming. It was a nervous change for me, having been on Nukeproof for so long so it was something different,” Grant acknowledged.

“It was fantastic [to join a new team] but the brand itself has a lot of heritage and history and they used to have a team 15-20 years ago but for whatever reason they got out of racing, so this is their return now.

“It’s a brand that not many of us have heard about but in Europe and Germany it’s massive. It’s one of the bigger brands but it was a bit of culture change and everyone involved are just as friendly as my previous team and they all have one thing in mind which is to race well and have a good time.”

And the move has paid off handsomely already with the former Omagh CBS pupil earning the German brand their first ever top 10 finish in the series as he has settled into his new surroundings with relative ease.

Unfortunately, things got off to a disastrous start for the Tyrone man, who suffered a fire at his Rostrevor home, which destroyed the bikes Rotwild had sent him before he had even got them out of their boxes.

“That was great craic!,” he exclaimed. “They sent me the new bikes to try and I didn’t even get them out of the box before they burnt!

“My shed burned down and took everything with it!

“Thankfully [the team] are very good, they sent me out some new bikes, and thankfully no-one was hurt. It was a set-back but it wasn’t that big a hindrance because the team were so good.

“These things do happen and on this occasion it happened to us and it was a bit of a catastrophe but we were lucky too because the fire brigade said another couple of minutes and the house would have been up too.”

After that inauspicious start to life with his new team, Grant admits that he travelled to the first round of the World Cup with little to no expectations – not because of what had happened to his new bikes but due to the fact that the team was so new and he was entering his first E-bike campaign.

But come the end of the first round of the World Cup in Italy any doubts soon disappeared.

“We went into the season without a whole lot of expectations, it was more wondering if this team is going to work,” he explained.

“I know the guys started the team from the ground up and as much as I had every bit of faith in them, there was also the thing in the back of my mind acknowledging that it’s not an easy thing to do.

“Arriving in Finale and seeing the set-up and what they had prepared for us was a bit of relief because it was pretty amazing. It’s a top class team, bigger than I was expecting with a lot of top sponsors on board and a lot more staff than I was expecting, so it’s worked out well.”

Kelan started the season in Italy at Finale in May and he got off to a solid start with a top 30 finish in 27th place before he achieved his new team’s first ever top 10 with a 9th placed finish at round two in Poland at Bielsko-Biala.

“The first round was a bit tricky because it was a brand new bike that hadn’t even been launched yet, so we were still figuring a few things out,” he explained.

“We had a few issues there – nothing serious – but we got to the bottom of it after that weekend and we started to do better after that.

“We went to Poland after Finale, which was great because I ended up getting a top 10 there which I was quite pleased about because that was the teams first top 10, which is what we were aiming for this year in order to get recognised a bit.

“Poland was fantastic, I’m hoping we get to go back there. Being somewhere new, a new venue, somewhere I hadn’t been before, the fresh tracks and the people were really nice as well, to experience a new culture was great.”

After that high, the 31-year-old continued to enjoy a consistent run of results with four top 20 finishes, including two in the top 15, over the remaining rounds and he finished second at the Irish National Enduro Championships.

“I secured a couple of decent results over the remainder of the season, knocking in and around the top 10 or just outside it,” he said. “The racing got tighter and tighter as the season went on because there were quite a few new teams this year and they were figuring out stuff as well.

“I think once everyone started getting their heads together and figuring things out, everyone started going faster and the racing became more competitive, which was great because the times got tighter and it was good fun.”

World enduro

After the World Cup season ended, Grant had the privilege of competing in the first ever World Enduro and E-Enduro Championships, which took place in Val di Fassa Trentino in Italy.

And while he didn’t have much luck during the event, he was delighted to have the opportunity to take part in it.

“The World’s wasn’t great for me because I had a mechanical – I had brake failure at the start of the day. I ended up riding around with that issue and it makes you appreciate how nice it is to have brakes!,” he joked.

“It was cool though, it was something different and a big leap in the right direction for our sport. We haven’t had an official UCI World Championships before, so that was the first one.

“They have been trying to do it for years, but it’s been difficult to nail down and it’s great that they have finally done that because it was a great event.

“Minus the mechanical it was nice to be part of the event and I’m looking forward to next year.”

It’s been quite the journey – not just this season but throughout the last six and even in the years before – for the 31-year-old who admits that his arrival at the top level of the sport hasn’t been a quick one and he admits that anyone keen to folllow in his footsteps needs to be patient, enjoy some luck but most importantly they have to work hard.

“I grew up in Gortin when there was no tracks and we just made do with what we had and eventually when we got driving licenses or knew someone who could drive we travelled to all these bigger venues with more established trails and that led to racing,” he explained.

“Once you do a bit of that, you get the bug, become addicted and for me I just strived to get better and better and it led to good things eventually.

‘Work behind the scenes’

“There’s a lot of work behind the scenes, because these things don’t just happen overnight. You have to keep chipping away at it and be in the right place at the right time, speaking to the right people and obviously impressing those people, be that with results, personality or even what you can do online to help them sell product.

“It was a slow burn at the start but there is no simple, easy path [to becoming a professional]. You have to be dedicated to the craft, which is really the main thing; be approachable as a human more than anything because these people are everyday working people who want to be associated with people they like to be around and who are pleasant to be around.

“But the main thing is to work hard on training, skills and making the time to travel to races to prove yourself is massive especially for someone starting up.

“These things take time, I don’t think anyone starting out will get on a big team. It can take years but if you’re dedicated and you believe in yourself it’s more than possible.”

And having achieved his goal of turning professional and sustaining that ambition over six years, he’s hoping to get a new contract that will keep him with Rotwild until 2026 signed very soon as he has not only gets the chance to remain involved in the UCI Enduro World Cup, but with people he enjoys being with.

“I’m hoping to stay with these guys for as long as I can because being happy in a team is everything,” he added.

“If you don’t get on with the people you’re spending half the year, maybe more, with then it’s a long time. The German’s have been great, they have been more than accommodating, and they seem pretty happy to have me as well, which makes me feel good too.”