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A snow-covered glacier start, a 2,600-meter plunge, and one Frenchman fighting for the win.
Kilian Bron’s onboard camera drops you straight into the chaos of the 2019 Megavalanche, the mass-start mountain bike marathon that begins atop the Sarenne glacier on Pic Blanc and ends in the valley floor at Allemond. Held July 14, 2019, at Alpe d’Huez, the race is less a downhill run than a full-body survival test — snow, scree, rock gardens, and pedaling sections stacked over roughly 20 kilometers and 2,600 vertical meters of descent. Bron, fresh off a win at the Mountain of Hell just days earlier, lined up on the front grid with hundreds of elite downhill and enduro riders around him, all chasing the same finish line.
- Bron started from the front grid at 3,330 meters on Pic Blanc and hit speeds up to 100 km/h across the glacier’s snowfield before the course turned to loose rock and singletrack.
- He finished 2nd overall out of roughly 1,400 weekend participants, fighting for the lead deep into the closing kilometers before conceding to Portuguese rider José Borges.
- Kévin Miquel rounded out the podium in 3rd place.
The Course That Punishes Every Rider Differently
The Megavalanche’s route is brutal by design. It opens on a glacier at 3,330 meters, where riders are managing ice and slush rather than dirt, then funnels into steep alpine singletrack littered with loose scree before finishing with grinding pedal sections down to Allemond. Bron’s footage shows exactly why the race has built its reputation: a rider can be flying at 100 km/h one moment and picking a line through boulders the next, with almost no margin for a mistake over 2,600 meters of vertical drop.
Bron’s Momentum Heading Into Race Day
Bron didn’t arrive at Alpe d’Huez cold. He came off a victory at the Mountain of Hell just before the Megavalanche weekend, giving him real form and confidence against a start grid stacked with downhill and enduro specialists. That front-row starting position mattered — in a mass-start race with roughly 1,400 entrants, positioning off the glacier can decide who’s even in contention by the time the course narrows into singletrack.
2nd out of 1,400 participants — 100 km/h on snow, then up and down to keep the pace.
The Final Kilometers Decide It
Bron stayed in the lead fight for most of the run, trading position as the terrain shifted from open snow to technical rock to the pedal-heavy stretches near the finish. It came down to the closing kilometers, where José Borges pulled ahead to take the win, with Bron settling for 2nd and Kévin Miquel claiming 3rd. For a race decided as much by tactics and terrain-reading as raw speed, holding a podium spot against that field says plenty about how clean Bron’s line choices were all the way down from Pic Blanc.
Bron closed out the video already looking ahead, saying simply that he’d be back to try again. For a rider who’d just come off a Mountain of Hell win and still finished 2nd out of 1,400 at the Megavalanche, that’s not a small thing to bank heading into the next season on the calendar.
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