Yesterday Kamloops hosted it’s first ever cyclocross race (see the Wikipedia Cyclocross page if you’re not sure what it actually is). It was held up in Juniper, using parts of the Bike Ranch, the BMX track, the baseball park and even the kids playground! Basically, Cyclocross is a sport that focuses more on the ability to quickly mount and dismount your bike while moving. This means a lot of obstacles are placed in the way, not with the intentions of the racers being able to ride over them, but instead that they jump off the bike and run over them and then get back onto the bike.
The track, from what I could see with my limited views as a spectator, seemed very non-technical, and even pretty easy as far as climbs. However, they mixed in all sorts of obstacles as the pictures below will show (which I stole from the Taboo page on Facebook, I didn’t take these!).
There did seem to be a fair amount of curbs/logs that required hopping over as you can see here.
As you can see, a Cyclocross bike is basically a road bike with knobby tires and more clearance through the fork and stays for mud/dirt. Other than that, not much else seems to be that different!
It was Halloween after all, so many of the racers were actually dressed up for the day! The kids loved this Giraffe! Note the tight, curvy section they set up winding through the trees.
Yes, they even had the racers going through a section of the sandy/gravelly kid’s playground area!
This is where we stood to watch for about 15 or 20 minutes. The racers had to jump off, run up these stairs, and then jump back on at the top, ensuring that they managed to get clipped in quickly to hop over the curb and head back down to the dirt/grass again. One guy didn’t hop high enough as we were watching, and did a face plant into the dirt, blood coming from his knees and mouth/chin. He dropped out after being attended to by first aid.
This guy was amazing. He was the fastest by far of the racers we watched, and as you can see he even managed air time through the BMX track section!
This is Brad, owner of Taboo Cycles. He’s riding a bike I had originally considered buying when I ended up buying a mountain bike instead (and it was out of my price range by a rather large margin!). I would still be interested in buying this bike for some cross training next year if we can afford it!
Anyways, it was fun to watch and I really should’ve entered but I didn’t know about it before race day. There were some riding mountain bikes (both hardtails and full suspensions, 26ers and 29ers), so I wouldn’t have seemed too out of place. It would’ve been fun for sure, and really not very technical or tough I don’t think? We’ll have to see if this sport takes off here in the next few years. Most of the racers were from out of town (Kelowna, Vernon, Vancouver) as Kamloops is still relatively new to the Cyclocross scene. Pretty neat, though, that this event was held basically just out our back door!
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