New Zealand mountain bike stars have ridden their way into the history books as the first Oceania Cross-country Short Track Champions at the 2025 Oceania Mountain Bike Championships in Coronet Peak, Queenstown, New Zealand.

Cooper earned redemption in the Short Track, with a mechanical stopping him contesting for a ninth consecutive Cross-country title a day earlier. Cooper reversed the result from Saturday to claim the win over Sam Fox (Australia) with Samuel Shaw (New Zealand) collecting a second bronze medal.

“It feels good. It feels like a bit of redemption after yesterday. I would be pretty bummed if I didn’t walk away with one of the titles,” said Cooper.

“I feel like every race we have done this season I’ve kind of had to drive the front and just set the pace and drop riders one by one so I just wanted to take a different approach today and I spent most of the race fourth to sixth wheel, somewhere in that range and felt pretty comfortable and then I knew I needed to move forward on the last couple of laps and put in a big attack on the last one and the hard tail was good up the hill.

“Short tracks often like that it’s just being in the right place on the last two three laps is key,” he added of picking his moment to attack.

“I know myself it’s not a strength of mine short track, so I do need to be quite careful when the early part of the short track race now to blow my legs off and I need something left at the end.”

In the women’s there was no stopping Maxwell from a second gold with the national champion too strong. Maria Laurie (New Zealand) who claimed the under 23 cross-country title picked up silver with bronze going to Zoe Cuthbert (Australia).

“It was good. It was a cold one today. So just lots of layers. It’s a pretty brutal track again, this whole mountain biking place is pretty hard. Really steep but it was good, it was fast and it was fun,” said Maxwell.

Results
Elite Men – Full Results
Gold: Anton Cooper (New Zealand)
Silver: Sam Fox (Australia)
Bronze: Samuel Shaw (New Zealand)

Elite Women – Full Results
Gold: Sammie Maxwell (New Zealand)
Silver: Maria Laurie (New Zealand)
Bronze: Zoe Cuthbert (Australia)