Asa Vermette and Vali Höll are the first-ever winners of a UCI Downhill World Cup on Whistler soil. Pinkbike’s results from Sunday’s elite finals have Vermette topping the men’s field in 3:23.930 and Höll winning the women’s race in 4:13.405, both on the Stevie Smith-tribute 1199 course we previewed earlier this month. We flagged this one as round eight of nine, the last stop before Lake Placid decides the season. Turns out it decided a lot more than just a weekend.

Vermette beat Max Alran by 4.365 seconds, with Amaury Pierron third. Höll beat Gracey Hemstreet by 0.334 — practically nothing, at the end of a four-minute run — with Lisa Bouladou third. Straightforward on paper. Nothing about how Sunday actually played out was straightforward, starting with a disqualification that erased what looked like the fastest run of the day.

Quick Take

Men’s winner	Asa Vermette (USA), 3:23.930
Men’s margin	4.365s over Max Alran (2nd), 7.032s over Amaury Pierron (3rd)
Women’s winner	Vali Höll (AUT), 4:13.405
Women’s margin	0.334s over Gracey Hemstreet (2nd), 2.682s over Lisa Bouladou (3rd)
Course	1199, 2.4km, 489m vertical, dedicated to Stevie Smith
Big twist	Lachlan Stevens-McNab’s leading run disqualified for a course-marker violation near the rock garden
Home riders	Jackson Goldstone and Finn Iles both missed the final; Jakob Jewett (5th) and Dane Jewett qualified through
Season context	Whistler was round 8 of 9 — Vermette now leads the men’s overall heading into Lake Placid
Best for	Anyone who followed the preview and wants the actual result
Skip if	You’re after a bike check — this one’s a results story, not a components teardown

A Winning Run, and a Faster One That Didn’t Count

Vermette’s 3:23.930 is the number in the results column, but for most of Sunday afternoon it wasn’t the run generating the noise. Canadian Cycling Magazine’s report from Creekside describes Lachlan Stevens-McNab going down the 1199 course with what looked like a 4.8-second lead — a gap that would have buried the rest of the field — before officials disqualified the run for passing the wrong side of a course marker near the rock garden. Stevens-McNab’s own reaction, on camera, didn’t pretend otherwise: “I got loose at the bottom of the rock garden… I just went to the wrong side of the pole, so yeah I’m fucking pretty gutted, to be honest.”

That’s a brutal way to lose a World Cup. It’s also, officially, not a footnote — the disqualification means Stevens-McNab’s time doesn’t appear on the results sheet at all, and Vermette’s win stands clean at 4.365 seconds over Alran, with Pierron a further 2.667 back in third. Singletrack World’s race report has Vermette putting it simply afterward: “I just put it down for the fans… they were insane. I did the run that I wanted to.” No qualifiers, no mention of the DSQ drama unfolding above him on the leaderboard. He rode his run, it held up, and it’s his first win since he opened the season on top in South Korea.

Rounding out the men’s top five: Luke Wayman fourth (3:31.814) and Canada’s Jakob Jewett fifth (3:32.017) — a legitimate home-soil result on a weekend that, as we’ll get to, wasn’t kind to Whistler’s biggest local names.

Höll’s Sixth Win of a Season She’d Already Locked Up

Höll’s margin over Hemstreet — 0.334 seconds after 4:13 of racing — is about as close as this sport gets. What makes it more remarkable is that Höll had nothing left to prove: she’d already clinched the women’s overall title at Les Gets before the tour even reached Whistler. We covered her tying Rachel Atherton’s all-time DH Worlds record at Val di Sole a month ago, and this win — her sixth of the World Cup season, per Singletrack World’s report — is the kind of result a rider with nothing left to chase usually doesn’t bother fighting this hard for. She fought for it anyway. “I came to Whistler when I was 14 — it was always my biggest dream,” she said afterward. “Win number six this season feels unreal.”

Hemstreet’s second place is the story the Creekside crowd actually came for. She’s a Norco adidas Race Division rider from Squamish, and she’d already flagged herself as the one to watch by qualifying third-fastest in Q1 and sitting 3.3 seconds clear of the field heading into finals. A home rider that close to winning her own region’s first-ever World Cup, in front of a crowd screaming her name, is the kind of near-miss that reads better in six months than it probably felt on Sunday. “Everyone cheering my name was the most insane feeling,” Hemstreet said. “I’m stoked but a little bummed.” Bouladou’s third at +2.682 and fourth-placed Eliana Hulsebosch round out a field that, unlike the men’s race, produced its result without an asterisk attached.

What Made Whistler’s First World Cup a Weekend to Remember?

1. A disqualification decided the men’s race. Stevens-McNab’s apparent 4.8-second lead evaporated over a course-marker infringement, handing Vermette a win that looked far closer on the results sheet than it did mid-run.
2. The home favorites didn’t make the final. Jackson Goldstone and Finn Iles, the two riders most people expected to contend on Whistler soil, both crashed out in qualifying.
3. Changing track conditions kept the whole weekend unpredictable. Muddy qualifying sessions reshaped the racing line through Sunday’s finals, according to Canadian Cycling Magazine’s report.
4. Racing was halted for a spectator injury. A fan was hurt along the course and required an airlift off the mountain — a sober reminder of what a track built for the sport’s best actually demands, even from the sidelines.

Goldstone and Iles Miss Their Own Party

This is the part of the weekend that stings if you’re from Whistler. Goldstone — the reigning back-to-back Elite Men’s World Champion, who defended that title on a stock Santa Cruz V10 at Val di Sole a month ago — crashed heavily in practice and again in Q1, then needed a top result in Q2 just to sneak through. He didn’t get it, finishing 15th in that session. “To ride this track you have to be fresh and you have to be on your lines,” Goldstone said afterward, which is about as honest a postmortem as a rider gives. Finn Iles, racing through illness and a recent injury, crashed twice across his two qualifying runs and missed his first final of the season. “I’m just physically empty,” Iles said. “I gave it all I had.”

The rider who eliminated Goldstone from Q2 is a name we’ve written about from a completely different angle this season: Aaron Gwin. We covered Gwin’s own US Open win at Deer Valley two weeks ago, where he was racing under a Frameworks Racing/TRP program built partly around mentoring a first-year elite teammate. That teammate is Vermette. Gwin posted the Q2 time that knocked the reigning World Champion out of his own hometown final, on the same weekend his mentee won the whole thing. That’s not a subplot. That’s the kind of coincidence this sport hands you maybe once a season.

Not every Canadian name had a rough weekend. Dane Jewett posted the fastest Q2 time among the men and advanced through, and his brother Jakob backed it up with a top-five finals result. Two very different Sundays from two riders representing the same last name.

Vermette’s Bike, and the Frameworks Connection

Vermette races for Frameworks Racing/TRP, the same brand behind the $3,999 Enduro and DH frames we reviewed back in February — a genuinely budget-priced gravity chassis built with a Fox Float X2 shock included, aimed at riders who don’t need a major-brand dealer network to trust a frame. Vermette isn’t riding the exact consumer build we tested; his is the team’s World Cup-spec DH bike, built in Taiwan for 2026 and running TRP’s own EVO DH drivetrain and EVO PRO brakes alongside a Fox 40 fork and Float X2 shock. But it’s the same platform, the same small brand, and the same case we made in that review: you don’t need a legacy dealer network behind a frame for it to be fast. Vermette just proved that on the sport’s biggest stage a World Cup podium offers, with a former World Cup overall champion as his own teammate and mentor.

Where the Overall Standings Stand Entering Lake Placid

We flagged in our Whistler preview that round eight carries real weight — whoever leads the standings walks into the finale needing to defend it on unfamiliar ground. That’s now Vermette’s problem to manage. Per Singletrack World’s reporting, he takes a 96-point lead over Jordan Williams into Lake Placid — the same Jordan Williams who stood on the Worlds podium at Val di Sole a month ago, next to Vermette’s own fourth-place finish there. Pierron’s third place at Whistler keeps him mathematically alive too, trailing by 174 points with 250 still available across the finale. Mathematically alive isn’t the same as likely; that’s a big number to close in one round.

On the women’s side, the title question was already settled at Les Gets before Whistler’s tape went up. Lake Placid still matters for the minor placings and for riders like Hemstreet building momentum into next season, but Höll’s sixth win of the year was for the record, not for the championship.

Who Should Care About This

Anyone who read our Whistler preview and wanted the payoff. This is the result — full margins, the DSQ twist, and what it means for the finale, not just the buildup.

Riders following the men’s overall title race. A 96-point lead with one round left is close to decisive, but Pierron’s still mathematically in it, and that’s worth watching into Lake Placid.

Fans of the Frameworks Racing/TRP story. Between Gwin’s US Open win and Vermette taking the overall lead on the same small-brand program, this is shaping up to be one of the season’s better underdog narratives.

Who Should Skip This

Anyone looking for a full bike check on Vermette’s race-spec Frameworks DH. We’ve covered the frame’s consumer version and the team’s general spec here, not a component-by-component teardown of his exact Whistler build.

Readers wanting a deep dive on the Forbidden prototype or the Greenland eMTB-frame story from the same weekend. We covered that one separately — it’s a bike-engineering story, not a results one, and it doesn’t touch the racing covered here.

The Bottom Line

Whistler finally got its UCI Downhill World Cup, and the weekend delivered exactly the kind of chaos a first-time venue with decades of built-up expectation was always going to produce: a disqualification that erased what looked like a runaway win, two hometown favorites crashing out of their own final, and a women’s race decided by a third of a second between a champion with nothing left to prove and a local rider giving her everything anyway. Asa Vermette and Vali Höll are Whistler’s first-ever World Cup champions, on a course built for Stevie Smith, and Vermette now carries the overall points lead into Lake Placid needing to defend it on a track nobody in this field has raced before either. Round nine should be worth watching.

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Reporting sourced from Pinkbike’s results coverage of the elite finals, Pinkbike’s video of Jackson Goldstone’s Q1 crash, Canadian Cycling Magazine’s report on the weekend’s chaos, Canadian Cycling Magazine’s qualifying report, Singletrack World’s race report and standings breakdown, and Pinkbike’s bike check on Asa Vermette’s Frameworks DH. No test unit has been ridden by our team at time of publication.