“Do you fancy going to see one of the rounds of the cyclocross world cup later in the year? We could take our gravel bikes and make a long weekend of it?” As a veteran of numerous CX world cup and world championship viewing weekends over the past twenty years, Olly thought he knew how to make a mixed CX/gravel weekend fun. Despite the fact that only one of his regular gravel riding buddies actually ride or race CX, everyone else were keen televised CX racing fans and jumped at the chance to see it in real life. Plans were made, tickets booked and the #fridaygravelgang were soon on their way to Antwerp. Read on to find out how they got on.
“Is it ok if we ride around the course?” we asked one of the high-vis wearing marshalls. He gave us a quizzical look as though we had asked him something completely absurd and then replied “Of course it is!” If you are a petrol-head and you roll up to the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit and ask to go for a quick spin around the track or you arrive with your 5-a-side team at a Premier League football ground and ask if you could have a kick about on their pitch, we suspect you’d get pretty short shrift. But turn up with a bike to a UCI World Cup CX course and (assuming there’s no racing or official training sessions going on) then the marshalls will generally welcome you onto the course with open arms.
Strictly speaking, only one of the Friday Gravel Gang (FGG) had actually bought a CX bike with them - everyone else had brought gravel bikes or monstercross bikes. Mine was even fitted with full length mudguards, a bell and heavily laden bar bag. If any of the UCI scrutineering team had been on standby with their clipboards and vernier callipers, only Dave, on his “proper” CX bike (complete with regulation 33mm wide tyres) would actually have been allowed to race and even he was running a rear mudguard, which would have raised a few eyebrows. Luckily, the marshalls weren’t concerned with our unusual bike set-ups and in fast-fading daylight we were soon riding around the course. It became apparent almost instantly just how talented world-cup level CX riders are and that our self-belief in our gravel riding skills was going to be severely tested.
For anyone who is new to CX racing, it’s a close relative of gravel riding, but with some significant (and some more subtle) differences. From a bike perspective, the biggest difference is tyres – the maximum allowable width for UCI-sanctioned events is 33 mm and many racers still choose to run tubular tyres (rather than tubeless). Frame geometry is slightly different, with steeper angles to allow for faster, more reactive steering. Many riders choose to run either a 1x set-up or 2x with close ratio chainrings (36-46 is common). Very few racers will use a bottle cage and no-one uses mudguards, fits a seatpack or even thinks about fitting a bell! A lot of racers forego even having a computer mount and use a wearable heart rate monitor watch to monitor their vital stats instead. Riders are allowed to switch bikes up to twice per lap and the top riders will bring a full pit crew with them who will do everything from wash the bikes between laps, give advice on pace and positioning, provide emergency replacements of items like shoes or receive unwanted items like glasses covered in mud. CX course laps are short (around six – eight minutes per lap for elite riders) and riders complete multiple circuits during races which last between 30 and 60 minutes. The speed (and the levels of skill on display) are insane – it’s not uncommon for riders to be racing at 90-95% of their maximum heart rate for the full duration of the race.
Cyclocross racing typically takes place in autumn/winter which means the weather is going to play a big part in everything from race strategy to how pleasurable it is to watch the race as a trackside spectator (rather than from the comfort of your sofa…). We booked our Antwerp trip seven months ahead of time and then completely forgot about it until a few weeks before we were due to be there. Once we had remembered, most of the FGG then seemed to spend all of their free time studying the local weather forecast (and in the last few days before we travelled, hoping that it was wrong). Heading to Belgium in November was never likely to generate hot sunshine and dry, dusty conditions, so when it came to loading the bikes and kit into our vans, just based on the weight of the bags, we all seemed to have packed substantial amounts of winter riding kit. Late October had seen some pretty major storms impacting northern Europe so we assumed the worst, but hoped for the best!
Having been to numerous CX World Cups and World Championships over the years, I knew that taking our bikes and fitting in as much riding as we could around the CX race timetable was the best way to make the weekend feel like a proper holiday, so I’d spent a lot of evenings after work researching and planning different route options. I had an early stroke of luck when I discovered a local bike shop in the centre of Antwerp called Vittesse. The shop has a well-established ride scene and on their website were komoot links to various gravel and CX routes around the region. Each route came with a detailed description and photographs which was super helpful when I was figuring out the different options. I used their advice as the basis for three different routes – a 54k m (33 mile) ride on the Friday afternoon straight after we arrived in Antwerp, an 88km (55 mile) ride on the Saturday and a 45 km (28 mile) route for early on the Monday morning before we headed back north to catch our ferry home.
Our arrival was somewhat delayed thanks to monster traffic jams coming into Antwerp (caused by a section of their ring road collapsing into a sinkhole). This had two impacts – it meant our daylight window was significantly smaller and it also meant the forecast incoming weather front was going to hit us mid-ride, rather than arrive after we had finished. Wearing full winter riding gear, we set out on our first ride and within a few hundred metres of our holiday accommodation we were riding along a narrow ribbon of sandy singletrack. Big smiles were visible, although the ever-darkening skies were greeted with somewhat less positive facial expressions. When the storm arrived, it looked like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie with gusting winds, driving rain and unbelievably doom-laden skies. The moment that the hail was hitting us with such force that it actually hurt our faces was the point at which we decided to make a strategic short cut to our planned route. Fortunately, as the ride progressed, the weather front passed over and we even ended up riding in broken sunshine at points. A mix of gravel trails, woodland singletrack, urban trails, designated cycle paths and small roads all flowed beautifully together. Coming from the UK, where many vehicle drivers see cyclists as an annoyance, the attitude of Belgian drivers made a very pleasant change. Ironically, the only negative interaction we had with a car driver was with a tourist driving aggressively in a 20 kph zone. Of course, they were bound to have had UK registration plates on their car….
Day Two dawned bright, although the forecast was for strong winds and temperatures hovering around freezing point. An early section of our ride took us under the River Schelde by means of an amazing cycling/walking tunnel before heading right through the heart of Antwerp. I had planned to stop off at Vitesse to try out their coffees/pastries and to say thank you for the great route advice, but I’d brilliantly mis-read their opening hours and we arrived 30 minutes too early. The wind chill was impressively bitter, so we had a quick chat with a member of staff busy setting up the shop for opening, but then rode on in search of warmth and caffeine elsewhere. By utter luck, we struck gold with the Polly café and the staff didn’t bat an eyelid as a group of semi-frozen Brits came crashing in and took over all of their spare seats.
Vitesse’s route was inspired and we were treated with woodland trails, sections of pavé, beautifully smooth cycle paths, some really fun singletrack and the delights of Mechelen, a city whose stunning pedestrianised central piazza won us all over with its unexpected beauty.
I’d adapted the final part of Vitesse’s route to take us back across the Schelde by ferry as we were staying on the west bank of the river. As we rolled up to the ferry landing, a boat was sitting there waiting and as soon as we had boarded, the captain set sail. According to google maps, the boat was due to head straight across to the opposite bank, but as the captain turned the boat north and started to head downriver towards Antwerp, I realised that relying on google hadn’t been quite as reliable as I’d hoped! Fortunately, the first stop wasn’t far away and we had soon disembarked and were back on the bikes for the final stretch.
When you travel somewhere new for a weekend, half the point is to experience as much as you can, so we used the incredible tram network to head in to Antwerp for dinner. Despite the gloomy weather, the city was stunning. Later, with legs tired from a day of Belgian gravelling and bellies full of fantastic food, we headed home to get ready for our day at the races.
The weather forecast for race day promised a near 15 degree C rise in temperature – something we greeted with a level of scepticism known only to the residents of the UK where the weather forecasts are often so inaccurate as to be laughable! It turned out that the forecast was correct and we woke up a stunning sunrise and temperatures that felt like we had been transported to a different part of the planet. The omens for the day were obviously set fair when, as we waited at our local tram stop, the entourage of reigning UCI women’s World CX champ Fem Van Empel purred past in full Visma Lease-a-bike splendour.
Like small children allowed freedom to roam in a sweet shop, we decided to get to the venue as early as we could and we timed our arrival perfectly to coincide with the junior women blasting away from the start line. Surprisingly (and perhaps a little disappointingly for the racers), the spectator numbers early in the day were pretty low. The benefit for us though was that it gave us a fantastic opportunity to see the whole course and to scope out the best positions for photographs during the elite races. If you’ve only ever watched CX racing on the TV, the thing that will strike you first is just how rapid the racers are. Even the very youngest competitors, who could be as young as 16 years old in this category, were insanely fast and the majority had the seemingly magical ability to float a few centimetres above the surface of the ground.
The Antwerp course looked like a jumble of cooked spaghetti when viewed on a map and had been shoehorned into a relatively small plot, bound to the north and east by the mighty Schelde river and to the south by residential areas. The course designers made the most of the terrain and each lap had an impressive mix of surfaces. During the course of the roughly seven minute lap, racers would have to contend with deep sand, greasy off-camber mud, root-infested woodland trails, gravel hardpack, some small but incredibly steep man-made hillocks and a flyover constructed from scaffolding with steps to run up on one side and a steep, carpeted downslope on the other. The surrounding topography was essentially flat, which meant only one thing – speed. Races would be flat out from the gun and it would be true survival of the fittest to find worthy champions.
The sandy sections were the hardest to get our heads around. When we tried to ride them ourselves, despite the FGG having extensive off-road riding experience, good fitness and decent kit, we felt like absolute clowns – we ground to a halt, wobbled like beginners, failed to unclip from our pedals, fell over in undignified heaps and generally looked as though we were complete numpties. As well as looking inept, we were staggered at just how hard an effort was required to ‘conquer’ the course - one of the FGG recorded his highest ever power output on one particularly tough section of sand (and then fell over in a heap about half way along one sandy section.) In short, it was an amazing demonstration of just how good CX racers are and how easy they make it look on the TV coverage. If we’d have been racing, we would have finished last in the junior women’s category by quite a big margin…..
Next up were the junior men, the top ten of whom looked like future pro-racers in all but name. Their speed and finesse was even more impressive than the junior women. One of the biggest attractions for the (now swelling in size) crowds were the “planks”. For those of you who are new to CX, the UCI definition for planks is as follows: “This obstacle must consist of two planks placed minimum 4 meters and maximum 6 meters apart and placed on a straight section. The planks must be solid for their entire height, without sharp edges and not made of metal. They must have a maximum height of 40 cm and extend the entire width of the course.” If you looked back more than three or four years, it was only the top male elite riders who could bunny hop the planks, but recently some of the elite women and the top juniors of both sexes have also developed the skill to bunny hop them too.
The top riders head towards the first of the planks going basically flat out. At the last possible second, through a combination of skill, determination, talent and magic they manage to pull themselves and their bike at least 60 cm off the floor, before landing smoothly and then immediately repeating the process. It is genuinely one of the most incredible sights you will ever witness a cyclist do. The amount of bravery and self-belief required is staggering. The top ten riders in the junior mens race could all easily bunny hop them and lower down the field, there were plenty of others too. Even the ones who dismount and run over the planks, do so with a fluidity and grace that other riders would probably sell vital parts of their bodies in order to be able to emulate….
Next up on the schedule were the elite women. With the reigning world champion and all her main contemporaries signed up and the Antwerp race being the opening round of the 2024/25 UCI CX World Cup there were sure to be fireworks and the crowd were not disappointed.
After the first couple of laps where she was clearly just toying with her competitors, Fem Van Empel eloquently demonstrated why she is wearing the rainbow jersey and just rode away from the rest of the field. Her winning margin of 31 seconds doesn’t really show how much faster, smoother and just all round betterer she was than the other riders an Antwerp. Due to Fem’s dominance, the more exciting racing was actually to be found further down the field – riders were swopping positions constantly and there were some proper nail-biting moments in the early stages at least, before larger gaps started to appear towards the end of the race.
After the prize presentation ceremony for the women, it was time for the final race of the day – the men’s elite category. The majority of the world’s top riders were lined up on the start line. Current and former world champions Mathieu van der Poel, Wout Van Aert and Tom Pidcock were notable by their absence, but everyone else seemed to be there. By now the crowds had swelled to maximum, the beer tent was doing a roaring trade and europop was being blasted out across the arena. As the starting gun went off, all our previously held ideas about how fast pro CX racers were blown out of the water as the elite men set off. They properly re-defined just how fast was fast.
For the first half of the race a group of the pre-race favourites battled for supremacy. There’s a saying often used in CX which is “rubbin is racin” and it was never more applicable than at Antwerp. With the top riders desperate to show their start-of-season prowess to the crowds, their sponsors and to each other, we witnessed numerous sections where riders would be mere centimetres apart (if not actually touching shoulders in many cases) whilst riding flat out. How they manage to eke so much grip of their 33mm tyres is a mystery, but even the greasiest of off-camber sections proved to be of only marginal difficulty and as for the sand – they hit it with such speed and energy that it seemed to meld to their will.
In the end, the victory went to Belgian rider Eli Iserbyt who managed to just ride away off the front of the pack. There wasn’t one easily identifiable section which sealed his victory – he just seemed to grind the other racers down.
He is somewhat of a polarising character though (to say the least) and it was really interesting to witness at the post-race podium ceremony that the top step of the podium wasn’t necessarily occupied by the crowd’s favourite!
When I had initially worked out a plan for the weekend, I had figured we could sneak in one last ride before driving north to catch our overnight ferry home. What I hadn’t banked on however was that the weather gods, having smiled benignly on us for race day, had decided we had used up all our good luck and the forecast for the Monday morning was atrocious – heavy rain and strong winds were back on the cards. I refreshed the different weather forecasts on my phone roughly every ten minutes as Sunday evening wore on. Not long before we were all heading off to bed, it looked as though if we went out properly early and made sure we were back by 9am, we might just have a window of dry weather before the storm front arrived.
The chance to do one more quick lap of the CX course was too good to turn down, so we despite the fact it was pitch dark, we were on our bikes by 7.30am and made a bee-line for the course. While most of the barriers had already been removed, we knew the course well enough to be able to find all the key sections and spent some very fun time demonstrating just how much better the CX racers were than us! In the end we all managed to ride successfully up/down/across the muddy and off-camber sections (obviously our UK trail riding experience paid off here), when it came to the sandy sections, it would be fair to say that we would not be troubling the podium anytime soon! Having successfully navigated our way around the course we set off for the 10km ride back to our accommodation and managed to find a series of stunning singletrack trails which flowed from one to another. Super-fast, with just enough surface greasiness to make them entertaining, we arrived home bang on time and absolutely buzzing about how great the last ride had been. Not even fifteen minutes after our arrival back at our holiday house, the heavens opened.
We had squeaked in a final ride and it really bookended the weekend perfectly. We had managed to fit in so much into only a few days off work that it felt like a real holiday. If you ever get the chance to go and see a World Cup CX (or any other of the European CX races for that matter), I can’t recommend it too highly. Do some research into the local riding, take your gravel bike and I can guarantee you will have the perfect weekend. Just don’t expect the experience to turn you into Fem Van Empel or Mathieu van der Poel…..