and Brand just seems to get stronger - at nearly all races; hope she isn’t burning herself out
JV JV’ing
i blame mid atlantic snow and cold (which means we’ll have ice next for a while - yuck) for being silly enough to click a JV post. mea culpa
i don’t agree. I think when the teams that have Pogi/Vinge/MvDP (remco, wout, roglic) have a team that would be one of best teams in the race w/o their superstar all working to set the race up for said superstar - racing like EF is the best option by far. i’m grateful for the way they attack races.i think in races with pogi and mvdp - lisa and trek could benefit from more attacking even if mads or wout might not be as protected. grateful and humble would be a better look/attitude/approach in my boneheaded opinion.
i don’t have instagram so i’m prob only seeing part of the story (??), but the Vaughters post had a link to 8 or so posts at the bottom and 1 was old teammate Nate Wilson as coach to da stars. Nice to see super good dude having success coaching legends (despite any knuckleheaded influence he may have needed to shed from this stubborn old teammate).
about to coach myself into more easy trainer time bc my body no longer tolerates more intense rides with the winter time mix of weights and trail jogs.
the snow (soon to be ice) and cold oblige.
I don’t think the U.S. CX situation (men’s and women’s) is nearly as bad as it seems from a lack of top 10s. Though it is a bit cringey seeing most of them lapped at Dendermonde. There’s hope in the form of a number of youngsters of both genders knocking on the top-10 door.
And yeah, Honsinger’s stated “going back to school,” may be related to what RandMart talks about. Almost every U.S. CXer has said that living in Belgium for the winter pretty much sucks. Jeremy Powers just said it last week. And possibly doing the month-long CX vacation to do some C1/C2 races over there just doesn’t cut it when your goal is to crack the top 10 or better.
And Honsinger’s top-shelf turbo-diesel engine was just so seriously hampered by an inability to start well. I don’t know if that was just physiological, partly mental or what. But maybe she just decided she coudn’t overcome that barrier (no pun).
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It isn’t. It’s worse than it seems.
It’s really damn hard to produce top cyclocross talent when you don’t have races for them to participate in, and the domestic race scene hasn’t been this grim - at the elite level - in at least 30 years. There wasn’t a single national caliber race west of the rockies this season, and there hasn’t been a race with UCI points on offer anywhere on the West Coast since Nationals in 2019. Things have gotten so bad that a U-23 rider I work with has had to live in host housing all CX season just to make racing domestically possible.
Essentially all of the top talent in US cycling right now is coming through the HS MTB development pipeline, and with the success that those racers are now having in world class MTB, it’s going to stay there. When the US team selection for world’s comes out, some of the folks that turned down slots to start prepping for Mtb season will be pretty obvious, as will their priorities.
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What is your take on the state of the overall U.S. CX situation. In my small state (Alabama), the number of racers on weekends seems to half of what it was 10-15 years ago. Is CX dying in the U.S.?
If so, that is sad. CX is my favorite and seems to have advantages of relatively easy venue set-up (compared to road race or even crits), spectator friendly (compared to road races), and safe (slower speeds and soft surfaces). However, perhaps many are switching to gravel races/events, which are perhaps more welcoming to those more interested in participating than racing.
As an elite/professional sport, it’s completely dead. The “national” series is a joke, and at this point no one can actually make a living racing CX domestically. Up thread, folks were talking about Clara H and wondering why she hung things up… she had gone back to riding for her local club team last year after she decided pro road racing wasn’t what she wanted to do. The - hands down, no question about it - best CX racer in the US was riding for a neighborhood bike shop in Portland. Yikes.
Eric runs an amazing program, but he’s simply not going to be able to pay enough for racers to actually be full time professional racers, let alone the paychecks that the top domestic CXers were getting a decade or so ago. Eric Brunner found himself in a pretty similar position this season. That’s just where things are right now, and there aren’t many people who can afford to simply play out the string getting by on sub-minimum wage earnings while they hope that the scene turns around before they’re suddenly unemployed and underskilled people in their late-30’s with a display case full of accomplishments in a sport no one in the US has ever heard of.
At the grass roots level, it varies tremendously. Places like Portland and Seattle are still hosting races with larger participation numbers than anywhere else in the world (literally), and at least one race every weekend all season, but it’s a happening as a participation event, not as a spectator sport. There’s a pretty hard ceiling on the “elite” level aspirations of talent development when our biggest participation events are taking place 1000’s of miles away from the UCI level events. The East Coast UCI circuit is still happening, albeit at a reduced level (especially since Myerson walked away from the UCI). There are some other hot spots around the country - typically places with a decades-long history of promotion in the discipline - but most have seen fairly significant drops in rider numbers.
In other places, the pandemic pretty much killed the local races, and they haven’t come back.
Having said all that, word is that the Olympic announcement is essentially imminent. USAC/UCI is planning accordingly, and expecting that interest will skyrocket as a result, with $ soon to follow.
I expect that things are going to get very interesting, very soon.
If it becomes an olympic sport, will it be a winter olympic sport like the rumors were? If its a summer Olympic sport, do you think they’d force nations to pull from their existing road/mtb/track teams for the athletes, since the IOC has been contracting olympic village spots more than expanding
It really appears that it isn’t an “if” anymore, it’s a “when”.
Winter, and original speculation had it introduced for the Milan games (not a coincidence that the UCI has been hosting a “snow cross” in Val di Sole since '21) but I’ve recently been hearing France 2030, tied in to Lappartient’s bid for the IOC presidency.
Interesting. At least maybe that means the nest cx racers can participate, although i gotta admit i really dont enjoy watching the snow cross races. Maybe if they can do a course with snow sections, like the sand pits in normal cx.
Let’s hope that it’s NOT a slippery slope that leads us to FatBike racing
NTTAWWT
Oh yeah, domestically pretty much dead. I think we were referring to having a few people be able to crack the top 10 on European C1 races. But I understand how “U.S. CX situation” was a confusing eterm.
Which I think people like Strohmeyer and VLdSR and a few others may eventually be able to reach the Powers/Honsinger level if they really want to. Strohmeyer and Brunner are ranked above the likes of Thomas Mein and Ryan Kamp, around ~20th, which is pretty dang impressive to me.
That’s why I was talking about the difficulties living in Belgium all winter, which is hard to do for multiple reasons. Not their ability to reach that level racing domestically, which, of course, is a non-starter.
If they choose to continue just racing a month or so over there, then it’s unlikely to go from ~20th to ~10th, e.g. the Orts/Riberolle sort of level. And I don’t judge them one bit if they choose not to do that.
Yeah hopefully the governing bodies don’t give us an Olympic Val di Sole. I enjoy watching Val di Sole, but only as a novelty, not as “real cross.”
Since it’s paired with XC, and there’s been rumor/talk about sharing a venue (not the exact same course, obviously, but same general area), it’d make sense since I see zero chance of sending XC runners over snow.
Isn’t there a new rule about prohibiting any kit which is the same color as a grand tour jersey? I thought pink jerseys were out.
The ranking system is broken, and has been for so long that the Euro riders don’t even get mad when they see the US guys show up and get their callups. It’s just a given now that come the kerstperiode, there are going to be a couple of Americans that they need to go around on the first lap.
It’s not so much a question of choice, it’s a question of paying for it. Essentially none of the American riders are good enough to bump a European rider from one of the Euro CX teams, and there aren’t any American sponsors with the cash to pay riders to do full expat seasons.
Olympic status is the only thing that might change this.
They’re allowed one other kit, in such a case for the Giro; if memory serves me correctly, last year it was mostly navy with pink details
Visma’s main kit was yellow, but went to black for Le Tour
Re-reading things i realize i read the rule wrong. I thought it was that they couldnt use any of the leader jersey colors all year. Turns out they just need to make sure their backup jersey doesnt have any of the other leader jersey colors in it.
Belgian CX nats should be a banger tomorrow
That was a class move by Plapp to help Durbo take the win down under. He knows who butter his bread and did a nice early season favor for the guy who is going to shepherd him with his ambitions later this season.
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