The races

Four-cross at the 2010 Worlds: Slavík and Buchanan take the titles

The races · By the editors of Ligne de pente · Published 2026-11-04

Four-cross, usually written 4X, is mountain biking's sprint: four riders out of a start gate together, a short downhill track of jumps, berms and rhythm sections, and only the first two moving on. At Mont-Sainte-Anne the qualifying runs took place on Thursday 2 September 2010 and the finals on Friday 3 September.

Where 4X came from

The world championships first included a head-to-head gravity event in 2000, when dual slalom was added. Dual slalom put two riders on parallel courses; four-cross replaced it in 2002 and brought everyone onto the same track, which made contact, overtaking and race craft part of the event. Many of its riders came from BMX, and the skills overlap: gate starts, pumping through rollers, and choosing a line through a turn that blocks the rider behind.

The format

A 4X competition starts with timed qualifying. Each rider goes down alone and the fastest are seeded into a knockout bracket. From then on everything is decided in heats of four: the first two across the line advance, the last two are out. The final groups the four survivors, and a "small final" sorts out fifth to eighth places. A race lasts well under a minute, so the start gate and the first turn decide a large share of the results. Crashes and contact are common, and race officials can relegate a rider who causes one deliberately.

The appeal for spectators is obvious: the whole course is usually visible from one slope, a full round of heats takes only a short time, and every heat has a clear winner. At Mont-Sainte-Anne the 4X track shared the programme with trials and cross-country on the same days, so spectators could move from one discipline to the next.

2010 podiums

The men's final was a surprise. Jared Graves, the defending world champion, had won four of the six World Cup rounds that season and the overall standings, yet Tomáš Slavík beat him to the line. Michal Prokop, one of the discipline's most decorated riders, completed a strong Czech showing. In the women's event the young Australian Caroline Buchanan won her first elite world title, ahead of two Czech riders. Jana Horáková had won two World Cup rounds that year.

Across both races the Czech Republic took four of the six medals, a reminder of how strong the country's gravity and BMX culture was at the time.

What happened to 4X

Four-cross remained in the world championships for several more years, but the UCI later stopped running it as a World Cup series and dropped it from the mountain bike world championships. Some of its riders moved back to BMX racing, which had become an Olympic event in 2008; others went to enduro or downhill. Jared Graves, for example, later raced at a high level in enduro. In that sense the 2010 races captured a discipline near the peak of its international visibility.

Related pages

• Downhill at the 2010 Worlds
• Cross-country at the 2010 Worlds
• All 2010 podiums