2025 Erzbergrodeo Notebook – four-strokes CAN do it, Jarvis 2.0 and why a finisher’s flag isn’t enough
Enduro21 notebook from the 2025 Erzbergrodeo and another vintage trip to the Iron Giant to find the biggest talking points.
We look at why four-times race winner Manuel Lettenbichler is a chip off two old blocks, why wanting more than just a flag matters, praise the four-stroke massive, feel bad for Cody’s balls and more...
You’ve got to want it bad enough
Walking and talking around the start area before the flag dropped, it was fascinating to see how many riders had that same look in their eyes.
At the start of a race of this magnitude riders need to ask themselves: do they believe they can beat the guys around them on the line? Specifically, if you want to win Erzberg, can they put up a fight with Lettenbichler? Or are they just aiming for a finish? From where we were observing there were in two camps and at the and finish you could see who wanted it most.
Trystan Hart 100% started the race with the belief and deep desire to win. Part of the reason why he was so upset at the finish, we suspect, wasn’t because he’d lost an easy podium through a mechanical issue he had to fix on the course, it was because he hadn’t been able to challenge Mani for the win.
Another mid-pack start cost Hart dearly by sapping time early while the leaders rode clear at the front and the truth is he was fighting a losing battle from then on. The rear sprocket bolt problem was the nail in the coffin for the Canadian. For sure he'll be back.
“I need some chips or something. Anything. I’m knackered.”
Jonny Walker earned his money at this Erzberg. To prove how hard he’d worked when we tapped him on the shoulder for a quick interview in the winner’s enclosure, he literally fell over backwards.
As a Red Bull athlete, this race is top priority, but there have been times in recent years when you could say JW22 hasn’t always had his heart in it. He told us many times how the privateer life and not enough support from Beta made competing at the highest level in major races too hard.
But the renewed energy, the required effort in training and preparation, plus having a team around him again, have reignited the spark in the eye that we used to see when he was winning these races.
“I want to do it,” he told us two months ago. “I believe the bike can do it,” he said ahead of taking a standard Triumph TF 250-X directly from the media launch in Spain and making it his own, fit for purpose specifically for this race.
Four-stroke can’t do hard enduro?
Two-strokes are favourites for extreme enduro, this much we know. They’re lighter and the engine character suits the wildly different approach to throttle control and power needed to go from docile, bottom of the revs like a trials bike, to flat-stick up an Erzberg hillclimb.
They run hotter, so the major talking point ahead of Jonny riding Erzberg 2025 was: could it hack the heat of it all?
The answer is yes — and in a race where the temperatures were high for the main event (it rained hard at one point but made little difference to temperature in the hardest sections and where the bikes were running at their hottest), this was high praise for the toughness of the Triumph 250F, which had the test of its life.
While the British manufacturer might have been nervous about the outcome of the idea, in terms of their “marketing strategy”, Jonny sure proved it was worth it. If they don’t shout from the rooftops about how tough their new bike is, they need to have a word with themselves.
Four-strokes can do hard enduro and have finished Erzberg in the past, notably Graham Jarvis and old Letti — the original one — Mani’s dad Andreas, who clocked a podium on the BMW 450X of all things.
But in the modern era, where the sport has progressed so much, nobody serious about the race result is on a 4T. Like Cody Webb determined to make the YZ a race winner, Jonny seemed as much spurred on by making the four-stroke Triumph work as he was serious about the race result.
There’s talk of a new four-stroke class in the Hard Enduro World Championship — this proved there should be one.
“Trystan rode over my bike, I had to work hard to come back.”
Two other riders who clearly wanted it badly enough are Teo Kabakchiev and Mitch Brightmore. They pushed each other hard, overtaking Walker and capitalising on Hart’s bike issues to produce one of the closest podium finishes in Erzberg history.
A typically dramatic ride saw Sherco’s main man at Erzberg ’25, Bulgarian Kabakchiev, battling with Billy for the holeshot and holding his own with Bolt and Lettenbichler for much of the first hour of the race.
Teo said he was thinking about last year, where he went too hard, too early, and blew himself out. If that made him slow or if it was mistakes in the rocks, he lost the leaders and came under pressure from Walker, Brightmore, and particularly Hart who, in determined mood, rode into the Sherco rider for the overtake.
“I had to work hard after that, to pick myself up and dig deep,” Teo explained when he dropped to sixth and five minutes behind Hart in third at one point.
But in the infamous slippery, steep-sided ravine in the trees named Motorex Highway (formerly Green Hell or Grüne Hölle), Teo overtook Walker, who was struggling with a too-hard rear mousse choice, and entered a dogfight with Brightmore for the podium.
With Hart at the side of the track fixing his bike, the fight went right to the finish line and saw Teo third by just two seconds and putting Sherco on the Erzberg podium once again.
“That’s racing”
Mitch, meanwhile, had no shortage of hard work himself and was clearly gutted to have lost a podium at the very death of the race. “That’s racing, it’s just one of those things,” he told us, sat on a log at the finish, but the disappointment was clear.
Mitch had worked as hard as anyone to get into podium contention from the fifth place he’d held for the large majority of the race. The disappointment is exactly what you would expect from a young rider making big steps to get himself in this kind of podium position.
That 45-minute fight to finish with Kabakchiev was decided by a final block pass on the hill exiting Lazy Noon (the final CP before the finish), and the now legendary scrap saw them arrive at the finish together — with the Sherco rider Kabakchiev just grabbing it.
You can certainly add these guys to the list of riders giving it everything for their best possible result, right to the finish. Both started the race wanting more than “just” a finisher’s flag.
50 not out
Speaking of people with a collection of Erzberg flags, let’s hear it for Graham Jarvis (once more). 50 years old and still able to put it inside the top 10, 45 minutes behind the winner, and from the second row start.
Imagine Graham’s result if he’d started on the front row, at the same time as Mani, didn’t have the queues which come from starting further back (although he admitted to us the queues “gave him a rest”!), and could do his old-school thing.
Graham was in 61st place at Checkpoint one, Water Pipe hill. He was inside the top 15 by mid-race and 11th heading through the impressively long Carl’s Dinner and unbelievably difficult Motorex Highway, checkpoints 22 and 23.
10 minutes later, he’d leapfrogged Alfredo Gomez, Wade Young, and Will Riordan through CP24 and reached the finish (CP27) looking fresher than many of his much younger rivals – he was standing up and smiling where many of the “kids” were sat down and exhausted.
Graham’s only complaint was not getting any prize money for P8: “Another flag, but no prize money this time,” he told us. “I’ve spent a couple of grand instead of winning it!”
FYI Graham told us he’s in for the 2025 Hard Enduro World Championship, plus Romaniacs, so stay tuned to the old boy’s progress across the season.
25 years apart but peas from the same pod
There are many things you can say about Manuel Lettenbichler, who took his fourth Erzberg rock home to Germany in a row, and his riding technique: effortless, relentless, the bike not the body doing the work, never seemingly stationary in the toughest sections like Carl’s Dinner, able to make the hardest of the hills with the least energy burned…in general making it look easier than everyone else.
This is a list of skills you would associate with Graham over so many years past too, and it is definitely the trademark of Mani these days – he is Jarvis 2.0, you could say.
It’s the age-old thing you see from exceptional sports people: they take what was the best and improve, surpass, and advance to new levels.
Both were at their best on one short and horribly loose climb which held up many of the top 20 or so riders. It’s the hill which probably cost Billy any chance of challenging Letti, because it was here he lost two minutes attacking it four times.
Lettenbichler and Jarvis hit the ideal line, found grip and drive no one else managed, and had momentum where it mattered to carry them both up quickly and without burning energy. If you want to know how they do what they do, it’s in places like this where they cover the ground faster and use less effort.
“It’s not what I came here for”
All of this isn’t to ignore Mr William Bolt, by the way. By his own admission, he made a couple of crucial mistakes, found himself out in the trees a couple of times, in terms of his fitness and training (he said), and in the end had to accept second was his lot this year.
“It’s not what I came here for, but today Mani had the edge on us. I have to be happy with my riding across the weekend – I’m in a very different place to where I was 12 months ago – and we build and look forward to the next one.”
Cody’s Erzberg hex continues
If you haven’t seen how Cody Webb’s race went, then that’s worth checking out. Bike set-up and worries about doing the same as last year and crashing on the prologue meant a poor qualifying for row two for Goaty.
He was making great progress but had just a small issue at refuelling. Let’s just say from now on we’re going to be undoing our fuel caps a little more carefully…
After a wash and a change of underwear, Cody finished P17 at CP23, Motorex Highway.
A.O.B.
An Aussie at the Erzberg finish line has been a long time coming, hasn’t it? Well, no and we stand corrected by a guy recorded in the history books as Mr Morgan. In 1998, Stuart Morgan was racing for a German KTM team and ran much of that year's Erzberg in P3 behind Gio Sala and Mario Rinaldi before a hill caught him out and he dropped down, crossing the line with his teammate, dirk Von Zitzewitz in sixth and seventh.
A lifetime later and finally Australia has another guy at the line with Will Riordan who was in among it all weekend, riding with or near some of the most experienced riders during the race to take an Erzberg finisher’s flag back to Oz via the USA with ninth place.
As we said in our post-race results report, two riders at the finish line were easily more full of joy than anyone else: Spaniard Francesc Moret and Austria’s own hero Dieter Rudolf. Moret was another of the riders who stayed strong to the finish and was still overtaking through the last of the hard sections and checkpoints for his not-unlucky 13th place.
Clocking in with just two minutes to spare before the Erzberg horn blew for four hours, Rudolf claimed the last finisher’s place with huge relief and a certain amount of desperation as he raced to make the time limit. It was great to see.
Spare a thought for David Cyprian, who could hear the noise and cheering of Rudolf finishing, but just timed out at the last difficult section.
A whole row disqualified? A rumour that all of row four got disqualified due to jumping the start is not true, just one rider in fact (and one rider from the prologue for adjusting her numbers for a better start position). It is chaos on the start line at Erzberg, check out our own onboard footage from last year for evidence, but the organisers are clear, play fair or we will disqualify you.
Enduro21 caught five with the event boss, Karl Katoch, to talk about the race, its history, the shenanigans with the FIM and the World Championship, and more. Stay tuned for that in the coming days.
Erzberg delivered. See ya next year Iron Giant.
Photo Credit: Future7Media | Andrea Belluschi + Enduro21 archive
