Race Cyclocross!

I spent the day off the bike today to experience the Hofstade World Cup race as a superfan.

My mechanic and I wandered around, snapping photos and gawking at the level of stardom cyclocross racers in Europe attain.

Behold, the RV of Sven Nys. I was able to meet him at a small race last week but, it was impossible to even see him at Hofstade.

Marianne Vos has a sweet trailer, most of the well known women do.

Every racer has fancards to hand out. The bigger stars have throngs of people just standing around looking at them. It is an amazing dynamic. The pro riders are polite to everyone but, are forced to kinda ignore all the people to focus and get everything together before their race.

On the parcours, everyone starts cheering when the leaders of the race come through and the get deathly silent once they are past. I started cheering for racers I knew as they came through mid pack and people looked at me like I was crazy!

It cost 14 euros to enter and it was well worth it. There were crappy food vendors everywhere. Haribo candy, frites, more frites, coke.

Our parking spot was over a 20 minute walk away from the parcours! Cyclingnews cited 14,000 fans at the event.

Amazing.

I don’t go to many sporting events besides local bike races. You cannot imagine the crowds. Packed against the barriers, stretching to see their favorites fly past for a few laps. There were 2 giant television screens and from a couple places on the course you could see the specs of riders navigating the sand sections and then watch the progress on screen.

Ryan Trebon was sitting in 9th for the first half of the race and then lost a bunch of ground in the end. Jon Page, starting the race with no UCI points, moved up quickly from mid pack to a solid finish. I heard the Tonkin took a pretty nasty crash and Barry called it a day after a few laps on sick legs.

World and Olympic mountain bike champ Julien Absalon was present as well. He kept pretty low key in his tent warming up and all I got of him was this shot. He had a mediocre race, as evidenced in his comments to the media afterwards.

The tyres of choice were, of course, Andre Dugast. 34mm. File tread. Sketchy low pressure.

I also caught some bikes covered in some spray on stuff. Teflon? Silicone? I would like to note that none of the “top” riders had anything like that on their bikes.

In addition to the superstars, I saw that guy who is always getting lapped at the world cups.

The experience was stellar. If you ever have an excuse to go to a World Cup level race. Do it.