With the UCI Cyclocross World Championships coming up fast it’s all eyes on Tabor. The dominance of Mathieu Van der Poel and Fem van Empel this season has somewhat muted the discussions of potential winners, at the senior level at least, but that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate.
Cyclocross is often a little hard to penetrate, but luckily we managed to snag an expert to chat through the Tabor course, and tech decisions, and find out if anyone can beat the two favourites. Jeremy Powers needs little introduction to ‘cross fans – 90 victories and four national titles speak for themselves, but for many of us he’s also been the voice of ‘cross as a commentator.
To kick off, I asked him to give us a flavour of the course. Unlike big-name tracks like Koksijde or Zonhoven, Tabor isn’t dominated by a single surface or a standout feature, so what’s it like to race on?
Jeremy Powers: Tabor in particular, usually, the weather is the thing that makes it unique this time of the year. When it’s held as a World Cup in the earlier part of the year, it’s usually drier, and it can be just a total wattage track, meaning there is nowhere that you can’t just put down power. It’s very wide, and you can just, you can just put power all over the place. There are the double planks that you can ride, if you have enough gas in the tank, but it depends on how they’re placed. If they’re placed two inches differently you can’t do it; no one can.
[Tabor has] kind of got this upper section, then there’s like a big, long kind of gradient section, and then there’s the lower section. The lower section also has where now there’s some whoops, and kind of some jumps, which we’ve famously seen Zdenek Stybar cross before, then it kind of goes around the long side, and you’ve got that big hard staircase.
So where the race can be made is usually linking that staircase, right? That really long hard staircase, there’s a climb after it, you’ve got to have a big engine, gotta get off your bike gotta hit those stairs, you’ve got to punch it up that section then you’ve got to descend this like criss-cross section, and then you have to be able to have enough gas to punch it up over those planks. And then you continue with all your upward momentum to the top part of the course.
There’s no hiding on this track. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that this race…
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