shots on goal

I'll expose myself to ridicule from all my American sports fan friends for having curious tastes and send you all off to this decidedly amateurish Belgian site that nonetheless has some very cool photos from this cyclocross season. Click on the names in the left frame to see a slow-loading collection of photos of guys doing things on bikes you probably didn't think you were ever supposed to do.

What the hell is cyclocross? Decades older than mountain biking, traditionally, it's what many of the old time road racing pros would use in the off season (read: winter) to begin preparing for the following year's racing, using modified road bikes with lower gears, fatter tires, and cantilever brakes. It has evolved into quite a competitive discipline of its own, dominated mostly by specialists. The last rider I can think of who excelled on the road and in cyclocross together would have been Dutchman Adri Van der Poel, who retired a few years ago.

Cyclocross has actually been gaining in popularity, especially in the States among existing cycling fans. It's a wonderful, crazy, and outrageously difficult sport that will tear your lungs out and crush your heart in a vice of pure pain--if you get competitive. From a fan's point of view it's no better than in Belgium, spiritual home of cyclocross. A major pro cyclocross race in Belgium is something else. Thousands of wildly drunk fans clanging cowbells and roaring their approval or invective within feet of the riders; crazy drunks slipping and sliding in knee-deep mud waving Lion of Flanders flags while wearing viking horns and all kinds of other crazy costumes, smeared in mud...you know those crazy fans you'll see in the stands in December for the Green Bay Packers, painted, no shirts, yellow afros? Those guys...but Belgian and much more drunk.

Being a weirdo, and cyclocross being a weirdo sport, naturally, I love it. Ten or more years ago, a major part of my daily life was taking an old Bianchi roadbike I had which I'd fitted with slightly fatter tires and lower gears--and not much else--and riding it up in the Santa Monica mountains; on dirt Mulholland, Nicholas Canyon, but especially up and down Temescal, and, my favorite, Sullivan Canyon, through the stream, over the rocks and trees, and all that; both directions. The incredulous looks and comments I'd get from people were always great fun! A favorite refrain would be "you can't do that." Yet...there I was...doing it.

Amazingly, in countless days of riding those canyons, I can only remember having one flat...but I was also a pretty good bike handler and didn't go plowing over obstacles like guys on mountain bikes do. That's so much the art of cyclocross: precision handling and the picking of efficient, clean lines.

Of course, on the really steepest, loosest pitches, a cyclocross bike cannot do what a mountain bike can do, but in modest conditions (if you call Sullivan modest...I was pretty fearless), it'll give any moderate mountain biker a run for his money, and give you a whole lot more fun...and, turn you into a fiercely skilled bike handler to boot.

Everyone loves cycling in fair weather, but I've always had this bizarre fascination with riding in cold weather and bad conditions. I was happy as could be, riding through the snow and sometimes mud and very often rain of Denmark in the winters I lived there. We're talking 2 to 3 hour rides, on a nearly daily basis, sometimes in below freezing conditions. I can get dangerously nostalgic for those rides.

I am of course, from Southern California, and no one--not one single rider I ever knew--from Belgium or Denmark, pro, amateur, or just enthusiast, shares my appreciation. Okay...there was one guy, in Belgium; a high-ranking amateur who refused to turn pro. He didn't mind it. But he's weirder than me.

Later, I'll bore you with my other esoteric off-season cycling love, and that's track racing: the only place in the world where massive drinking, smoking, live rock bands, beautiful models and bike racing comingle!