Welcome CX Season 2009
As our unseasonably cool summer comes to an end—September rolling into autumn, our WOB Racing Crew and Bikes To You teams are excited about CX season, racing with friends, maintaining our fitness and regaining technique. Every ‘cross season since I began racing, I’ve tried to document a definitive history of cyclocross. However, the history of cyclocross seems to be buried under European lore and America’s acquisition of cyclocross in the 1970s. Cycling historians credit Daniel Gousseau as the ‘father’ of cyclocross; a young French soldier who rode through fields and forests on bicycle, while his general rode a horse. It is Gousseau who is given credit for the first French National Championship in 1902. Others historians credit Kevin Watson, a young man from Yorkshire, England, whose 1959 efforts became the Three Peaks 30 mile cyclocross race across rocky mountain faces. It is agreed upon that the “Criterium International” in 1924, organized west of Paris in the Forêt de Fausses-Reposes was the impetus that attracted the public and the official recognition from what is now the UCI: Suffer the Trou du Diable (Devil’s Hole).
Other cycling historians believe that in the early 1900s European cyclists would race each other to the next town through farmer's fields, over fences and any other shortcuts to make it to the next town first. Whether conjecture or fact, it is believed that the off road riding increased the intensity at which the cyclists were riding and improved bike handling abilities. The forced running sections and portages, helped deliver warm blood to the feet and toes, as well as exercise other groups of muscles.
Cyclists can attest to the benefits of cyclocross during the off season, just as much as we can justify the hours that we spend riding trainers from late December to early March by way of improved fitness.
What I offer is a personal history, while cyclocross may have its earliest “official” foundations in Europe, cyclocross is nothing more than riders remembering the way we began riding as children, across grassy fields, pushing muddied bikes over hills, hoping that we would find our ways home with aching muscles and the knowledge that we tried it over and over, added challenges along the way and invited friends to traverse open fields, soggy gravel roads, fences tied shut with bailing wire, to the short piece of chip and seal that led our way home. And there was mud caked to tires and frames, brake bosses clogged with the clayey soils of the Midwest; the rock strewn Eastcoast, and the wet sand of Golden gate park in the West. Remember those days?
So, it is with a sense of loyalty to the sport that we continue to carry our bikes across barriers, jump across creek beds, ride through sand, mud and run up hillsides with bikes in tow. Racing cross may lack terra firma often claimed by the Flemish, the French, the Italians, the Slovakians, the English and New Englanders but cyclocross is the cycling’s regolith—an unconsolidated history which may span the annals of cycling history and our childhood memories of cycling, and for many of us the fearless attempt to do something that seemed at once silly and necessary, to find our way home to hot cocoa and grilled cheese sandwiches, to dream of the future and of bicycling.
I will miss Guelph Cross this year in Southern Ontario, will miss the camaraderie of a hundred plus riders in a field and the joy of a late September morning, frost opening the lungs, tires slipping on wetted grass and mud, the off camber corners that challenged even the best XC mountain bikers. But we have a lot to look forward to this season with Dice Cycling continuing to hold some of the best races on the eastern half of Iowa, The Old Wooden Shoe, Corn Cross, Spooky Cross, and the State Championships in Central Iowa.
