Four World Cup overall titles with 27 individual wins. Three Superprestige titles. Three X2O Trofees. Three national titles in the sport’s most dominant nation. A 63-race podium streak.
These are results befitting of a real cyclo-cross champion, and qualify Lucinda Brand as one of the most successful and consistent riders of the last seven years. But there’s one area where her results just don’t line up: the Cyclo-cross World Championships.
True to Brand fashion, she has an astonishingly impressive podium streak at Worlds: eight times out of nine she’s finished in the top three. The one where she wasn’t on the podium? Fourth. So why is that consistency and winning ability she shows the rest of the year just not translating to rainbow jerseys? And is this year the year she could finally add a second world title to her palmarès?
Consistency vs the big moments
Firstly, it must be said that it’s not as if Brand is ever particularly far off the win at Worlds. Four times she’s finished second, and three times third, so she is always there. In 2022 in Fayetteville, it came down to a sprint against Marianne Vos – something Vos was probably always going to win. In 2020, taking third, she was only a handful of seconds behind the sprint for the win. Last year, she finished second to Fem van Empel with a relatively small deficit of 18 seconds.
There isn’t anything that specifically goes wrong for Brand when the rainbow jersey is on the line, and she certainly doesn’t struggle more in the big championships. That said, there is the possibility that Brand is one of those riders who just doesn’t always have the spark in the big moments.
There are riders who can win again and again, trudging round every corner of Belgium and the Netherlands on grey weekends to rack up win after win in a way that other riders struggle to do. And there are riders who may not win consistently, but have an ability to pull it out for the races that matter. There are riders who can do both, like Mathieu van der Poel, but they’re a rarity.
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