Thibaut Daprela admits the reaction to his eye-popping mid-run hand shake out at Val Di Sole was almost bigger than the fallout from his win at Andorra and his season-ending crash in Loudenvielle.
Fans across the globe stared in disbelief as the 22-year-old Commencal/MucOff By Riding Addiction rider took his hands off the bars in the middle of the infamous Black Snake track in the Italian Dolomites to give them a rejuvenating stretch. 
Photo credit: Kéno Derleyn
It was trademark Daprela, whose runs are hotly anticipated for their excitement and unpredictability, and the Frenchman says he was blown away by the reaction.
I don't know what I did, I don't know why. I was just relaxed on the bike and doing it and I think I forgot I was in a World Cup maybe but I don't know, he said.
It was crazy to watch after it and the comments and everything, everybody, they speak more about that than the guy who won the race. 100%. Yeah, it was funny, because I watched it and I was like, oh my God, it did look quite crazy.
Daprela said his win in Pal Arinsal, Andorra, his second elite World Cup win, was quite a relief when it came.
I didn't expect to win there, he says.
I was just doing my thing and I did a good run. But I didn't push too hard also because I just wanted to stay clean and it's what I did. And yeah, for sure the last two riders didn't come in the same conditions. But at the end, it was a very good run and it felt good to win again and take some good points.
Following on from that victory, Daprela had a spectacular over the bars crash in round five of the UCI Mountain Bike Downhill World Cup at Loudenvielle which broke the scaphoid bone at the base of his thumb and ended his season with three rounds still to go.
The young Frenchman’s elite career has been punctuated by injuries, winning his first senior World Cup in 2021 at Les Gets just a week after biting through his tongue during a French Cup. That season ended prematurely for Daprela though after a crash in Snowshoe, USA, sidelined him with leg and thumb injuries.
In 2022, crashes in Lourdes and Lenzerheide World Cups threatened to derail his season but the Frenchman, from Peymeinade, in the south-east of France, built back up from there finishing the season in 11th place overall.
And Daprela refuses to be characterised as an ‘all-or-nothing’ rider.
I want to be consistent, you know, but I want to win for sure, but not to win every time and just win or crash, he says.
So I didn't even crash a lot this year, this latest one and in the Worlds and maybe just another one but that's not crazy. It's not just go for it and we will see. Everything is thinking and calculating.
With Daprela’s French teammates - multiple World Champion Myriam Nicole and 2022 World Cup champion Amaury Pierron - both sidelined with injury as well, Commencal/MucOff have taken on privateer American Dylan Maples as wildcard member of their team.
In a recent Instagram post, Daprela stated he'll be "Watching from the other side for the next two weeks. A visit to the doctors showed that everything is healing well, but no miracles."
The UCI Mountain Bike World Series resumes this week in Snowshoe, West Virginia in the USA for the penultimate rounds of the UCI Cross-country and Downhill World Cups.
