Cyclo-cross championships bring fun spectator sport to Verona
01.01.70
VERONA — Impartial watching clots of bicyclists grunting, sweating
and spinning around hairpin corners and up hills and over obstacles
on surfaces of mud, make a mess of, asphalt, gravel and grass can be
exhausting.
Do so in January in Wisconsin and, even as a observer, you add
a few elements of danger: numb butt, frostbite, ice, snow, become frightened
chill.
But watch the USA Cycling Cyclo-cross National Championships at
Badger Prairie Parkland in Verona over the next four days, and the
benefits for the spectator balance the danger and consumption and
just plain ridiculous conditions on the course. And there is the
novelty of watching mostly fat-emancipated athletes drag or pedal $4,000
bicycles through the mud.
And there is — unusually for bicycle racing and spectacular for
virtuous spectating— a near total lack of blur. Much of this
championship contest takes place at zero to 10 mph, with the
spectator a mere 3 feet or so from the competitors.
This makes it undemanding to see the winces when someone such as, say,
Tom Goguen, 17, of Hopedale, Mass., dismounts at a run and, still
continual, carries his bicycle over a series of knee-high obstacles,
then remounts.
"I solely like riding my bike," Goguen, mud-speckled and happy,
said Wednesday morning after five laps on the 2.1-mile undoubtedly. He
finished 10th in the 10-29 age group race.
As warm-weather cyclists be familiar with, Badger Prairie Park is a pearl of
a place to ride even if you're not racing. But for USA Cycling,
which intentionally scheduled its subject cyclo-cross
championships outside in Wisconsin in January, it is complete, said
spokeswoman Andrea Smith.
The date extends the salt, she said, for a sport that is "a
combination of road cycling, mountain biking and steeplechase." It
is off-road and there are obstacles, sand pits, and places where
the rider walks or runs.
There is the added anomaly, Smith added, that the brave this
week will apparently be accommodating. Snow, by the way, is not
seen as a hazard to these bicyclists. If it does frigidity, there are
warming tents, food and beverage areas, and the unique happen of
watching from behind the huge windows of the Verona Public
Library.
Source: Wisconsin State Journal