![]() Between races, hundreds of people crowded into a tent in the inner vendor area of the race, dancing and reveling. And from the sidelines, it was more crowded, and certainly drunker, than even the most raucous NECX races I’ve been to. The course itself was steeper, muddier, wider, and packed in more features than any American course I’ve seen. Everyone - the best teen cyclocross racers in the world - failed and ended up having to run.Īs an American fan, the Valkenburg venue was familiar as a cyclocross course, but everything was just……. I watched as racer after racer gingerly slogged through the corner before the rise, then tried to get enough traction in the flat mud to have the speed to make it up the rise. Even in thick rubber boots, I could barely walk up the muddy rise to the edge of the course. This bump was pretty steep 4-5 foot rise, and turned out to be completely unridable. But it turned out that the mud made even the flattest, most boring parts of the course a challenge. ![]() There was a 90-degree turn, then a small bump in an otherwise flat straightaway. This flat-ish corner of the course looked fairly reasonable from a distance. We were rushing from the train to make the tail end of the junior race, and headed straight for the first bit of course adjacent to the ticket booth. It had rained the day before, but was bright and sunny on Saturday, so I wasn’t prepared for just how intense an experience it would be. As we trudged up the steps, the roar of the crowd came into focus, and I realized that this was not just going to be a race, but a spectacle. In the middle of a dreary winter full of trainer workouts, it was the perfect reminder that there’s nothing better than the adrenaline rush of being at a crowded bike race, even when you aren’t racing yourself.Ī few blocks from the train station, a narrow set of stairs wind up the Cauberg, providing the quickest way for us to get up to the race course. Last December, in a wave of end-of-cyclocross-season excitement and incentivized by ultra cheap airfare, my friend Dan and I decided, why not, let’s go to Worlds. The Cauberg is most famous for being the final climb of the Amstel Gold race, but it’s also the site of a spectacular cyclocross World Cup race, and last weekend was the site of 2018’s UCI Cyclocross World Championship. ![]() Giant colorful banners cupped the top of the hill, revealing a race course with a heart stopping amount of elevation change, visible from half a mile away. As the train pulled into the Valkenburg station from Maastricht last Saturday, I caught the first glimpse of a cyclocross course, way up at the top of the hill towering over town. ![]()
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