How great do these trails look, in Alsace, France?

Of course it helps they’re being ridden by former Enduro World Series winner Jérôme Clementz, buy boy do they look good to ride. How about that purple heather and big-mountain views?

>>Watch Jérôme Clementz set up his Cannondale Jekyll<<

A mix of Alpine singletrack and flowy woodland trails, this place looks like a whole load of fun too.

We don’t know exactly where this is but Jérôme lives in the Vosges national park in Alsace: just the other side of La Bresse, which hosted a round of the XC World Cup this year. Fair to say the trails are pretty decent then.

There are no ski lifts here in this mountainous region, but with 1,000m elevation, slopes that aren’t mega sleep and plenty of good singletrack (we’ve got it on good advice from Jérôme), that makes the Alsace the very top of our 2017 bucket list.

And Alsace is only 90minutes from London, we said. Yes, you can fly direct from Gatwick to Basel in Switzerland, which is just across the border from France. It’s probably a bit nippy at this time of year for a dip in the lake at the end of the ride though, a la Jérôme.

It’s not all home trails for Jerome of course, here he is in action in Chile…

We’re not quite sure how he doesn’t spanner himself in a crash in all that loose dust, so fast is he going. But then no one can get away with it all the time: in the 2014 EWS season he did just that and broke his clavicle…

Fortunately Jerome was back riding again within a year. Check out this really high Alpine stuff, this time in Switzerland, apparently searching for an escape from a heatwave rocking France at the time…

Actually, he seems to get about quite a bit, this is from Finale Ligure in Italy…