St. Clairsville, OH - Yamaha's Bill Ballance looks to his record-breaking eighth Can-Am Grand National Cross Country Championship in a row after winning Saturday's ITP Power Line Park GNCC in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Ballance grabbed the $100 ITP Holeshot award and then held on to win after a heated battle with East Coast ATV's Chris Borich, who actually crossed the finish first but was later penalized two positions when video tape proof showed he had ventured off of the course. This moved LTERacing.com's Chris Bithell into second place.
Ballance was leading the race until four miles from finish, when Borich was directed by spectators to make a sudden 90-degree turn off of the race track. He missed 300 yards of the course and ended up in front of Ballance at the finish. Borich's move was captured on tape by a GNCC official shooting video shooting for the Racer TV broadcast, who then alerted the rest of the track crew. Borich was taken back to the track to see the section he missed and was also shown the video tape. The video showed Borich was not riding through a bottle-necked or traffic jammed section of course, thus he was required to stay on the race track through that section, and course arrows clearly showed the track continued straight. The two-position penalty is consistent with the same penalty used by GNCC officials in similar situations in the past. After being told of the penalty, Borich didn't attend the post-race podium and interview ceremony. Ballance's win puts him in prime position to win the GNCC title at the series finale Klotz Ironman GNCC in Indiana in two weeks. Although he didn't see Borich on the last lap, he was pretty sure what had happened. "About as quick as I asked those questions, I figured them out pretty quick in my head what was going on," Ballance said on the podium. "The Yamaha worked great, and we got a win here today and we're that much closer to getting an eighth championship, so that feels pretty darn good." "I didn't have a terrible start," second-place Bithell said. "But I was about tenth or thirteenth. Through this dust--it was bad today. It was just powder dust. You just had to slowly pick people off and slowly take your lines around them."
Fourth overall went to Brandon Sommers, the XC2 Champion in his first-ever ride in the premier XC1 Pro Class. Fifth went to the ever-consistent Matt Smiley, with motocross champion John Natalie in sixth in the XC1 class.
Monster Energy/National Guard/Kawasaki's William Yokley was off to his best start of the 2007 season , after pulling second place off the line behind Ballance. Yokley held second behind the leader for two laps, until a mechanical failure forced him to pull off. "The start went really well," Yokley said. "We've been suffering on starts all year. We almost got the holeshot. I've been practicing at home and I knew I was getting better. I used to get good starts, and I knew I was getting it back to normal because I was there. My start actually made it to where you could get out there and ride, otherwise I'd be sitting there cruising around and running into ponds like other people. That's where I've been suffering. We're getting it worked out. It's a lot of work to develop a new bike."
Baldwin Motorsports/Wrath Racing Honda rider Adam McGill ran into trouble during the race. "I thought it was a little hot today, so I figured I'd say heck with the race--take a swim," McGill joked after taking a dunk in a huge mud hole. "When I come out of the woods, I seen the helmets going through in the dust, it opened up. I pinned it straight and the next thing I knew, the bike fell out from under me, flipped over and I was pinned in the water underneath of it. When I came up out of the water, I looked around, and I saw there was probably ten of us stuck in that swamp. It was horrible--chest deep, it stunk."