Like Switzerland’s Sina Frei, Charly Aldridge was also able to repeat the victory he achieved on Thursday in the Short Track event in the Olympic Cross Country race.
The final race of the 2026 MTB European Championships – which attracted around 10,000 spectators to Monteceneri over the four days of the event – proved to be one of the most fiercely contested of the competition, with the powerful British rider managing to fend off a determined comeback attempt by Italy’s Juri Zanotti, a favourite with the home crowd due to his past association with VC Monte Tamaro.
In third place, almost perfectly mirroring the women’s race – which had replicated the exact finishing order of the Short Track – was a Swiss rider: not Dario Lillo, however, who was rather disappointing on the whole today, but Fabio Puntener, who finished ahead of his team-mate Mathias Fluckiger at the end of what can nonetheless be considered an excellent performance by the Swiss team.
The 2026 MTB European Championships thus go down in the record books with Switzerland’s six gold medals – alongside seven silvers and three bronzes – France’s three, Great Britain’s two, and those won by the Czech Republic and Germany.
The edition that concluded today was characterised by a high technical standard, contested on high-quality courses much appreciated by the athletes and, apart from the heatwave of the first few days, favoured by the weather conditions.
Download the full results
