Not familiar with cyclocross? Let’s introduce you to your new addiction.
Hour-long cyclocross races are held on technical, hilly circuits and demand a high level of bike handling skill and physical fitness. A course circuit, no more than a mile or two in length, may include paved and unpaved surfaces, natural obstacles perhaps the most iconic of which is mud, but streams, bales of straw, wood barriers and staircases can also come into play. It’s designed to be mostly rideable. Mostly. The rest of it, you run while carrying your bicycle.
Sounds a bit like lapping on a torture course, but it’s also exactly the kind of short, intense, challenging fun that whets the appetites of the weekend warriors who abound in Boulder.
“It’s the largest growing type of bicycle racing and has been for probably the last five years,” says Chris Grealish, who has been organizing cyclocross races in the Boulder area for 20 years and is race promoter for the Boulder Cup cyclocross race, which will see competitors riding and running their way around Valmont Bike Park on Sunday, Sept. 14.
“There’s so much strong community support here in Boulder for the sport, starting with us putting races on in the late ’80s, but also bike shops and coaching companies and other cycling industry-related businesses are so psyched and so excited for the sport that everybody’s just really gotten behind it,” Grealish says.
The Boulder Cup course at Valmont Bike Park distinguishes itself with a hilly profile, a number of twisting descents and, of course, that long, wide staircase, called the “5280 steps,” situated so the view of the steps from the beer garden is against the backdrop of the Flatirons — “an amazing setting and beautiful scenery to watch people struggle up the staircase,” Grealish says.
Racers complete multiple laps on the 1.9-mile course.
“It’s kind of funny because, left to the naked eye, if you go by the park or into the park, unless we delineate the park using all the equipment we have — 7,000 feet of steel fence and hundreds of push stakes that we tape everything together with — it’s really difficult to see a cyclocross course at Valmont for a lot of folks because the mountain bike parts are so visible. But once we set everything up, it’s really an amazing course,” Grealish says.
But he’s seen race designers build courses in sur prising places over the two decades — perhaps the most unlikely of host locations the Flatiron Crossing Mall.
“I think people were blown away by the course we were able to create using this massive hillside,” Grealish says of that course, which also made use of part of the parking lot.
In 2013, 3,500 spectators came out to watch the Boulder Cup. Organizers say only the USA Pro Challenge stage race that circuits through the state has drawn more spectators.
Racers who might have ridden 20 years ago now have kids of their own coming out — and those as young as 4 years old can participate in events this weekend, including a strider race for kids not quite ready for clipless pedals, to say the least. Or, just bounce in the jumpy castle and get some face painting and a balloon animal.
“One of our primary goals is to provide enough ancillary entertainment for young families that is essentially all free, and really trying to market heavily to young families in Boulder County that this is a great way to spend an afternoon with their kids,” Grealish says.
Parental entertainment includes a beer garden stocked with Boulder Beer — and 100 percent of the proceeds from that beer garden go to benefit the local kids club Boulder Junior Cycling.
“I think that’s one of the great things about cyclocross is that for spectators, it’s so easy to watch. Often times, you can stand in one spot and see them come by four different times on any given lap,” Grealish says.
The cyclocross crowd in Boulder, fueled by the Boulder Cup, was part of the reason the National Cyclocross Championships were held in Boulder in January, Grealish says.
“The number one reason we got Nationals was the fact that we demonstrated that the sport was really strong here and with a facility like Valmont Bike Park it became a much easier sell to the national governing body,” he says.
Want to do more than watch? “There’s various age-graded categories, 27 different categories, starting at 8 in the morning with some of the masters and age-graded women’s categories. We have racing for basically anyone over 4 years old up to 70 — it’s kind of nuts actually,” Grealish says.
Riders from all over the world are coming to Boulder to participate. Competitors include Jonathan Page, winner of first place at the 2013 Cyclocross Nationals and four other CX Nationals titles; Olympian Michael van den Ham, fourth place finisher in the 2012 Canadian Cyclocross National Championships and 31st place finisher in the 2013 UCI Cyclocross World Championships; and Helen Wyman, two-time European cyclocross champion and seven-time U.K. national champion.
“Racing in the USA has always been an adventure as well as a challenge in terms of performance,” Wyman said in a submitted statement. “I’m always looking for new events to try and I’ve heard such good things about the Boulder Cup event that I wanted to give it a go for myself.”
This is the fourth year the Boulder Cup has been held at Valmont Bike Park, and it may be the last.
“We’re probably going to move it out of Valmont because it’s so expensive with the city,” Grealish says. Other locations might come at half the price.
“The application process with the City of Boulder is 32 pages long, some of these other towns, it’s two pages, so the degree of difficulty that exists with trying to make an event of this scale happen in Boulder exceeds the return in any way, shape or form. This year has been the toughest ever, by far,” Grealish says. “Before the city got a hold of the sport, which we introduced them to and hand-held them through the process the entire way, all you really needed was a field, a little paved strip and permission, and now it’s just become this 900-pound gorilla. I never intended to make it extremely difficult to make the races happen here, but that’s been a byproduct of the bureaucracy of working with a city like Boulder.”
After more than 20 years, he says, it’s frustrating to still feel pulled under the microscope and scrutinized each year, in addition to regularly having to educate new city staff on what cyclocross is and what role the Boulder Cup has played in establishing the sport in Boulder.
“Normally I’m a pretty humble guy, I swear, but in this case I feel extremely confident, we’ve done tremendous things for cyclocross and for Boulder and the city, and there’s no way they can take that away from us,” Grealish says. He plans to continue to work on growing the sport and keeping it fresh.
Respond: [email protected]
