When I think about the Elite Women’s race at Cyclocross Worlds during my time as a cycling jouralmalist, close, thrilling races are what come to mind.
The first Worlds race I ever wrote about was the bonkers last-lap thriller between Sanne Cant and Marianne Vos at Bieles in 2017. The second was the battle between Katie Compton and Sanne Cant in Valkenburg that we all thought was going to be the one where Compton finally did the thing.
Those were followed by Sanne Cant’s nerve-wracking last-lap in her win at Bogense, the Alvardo sprint win at Dubendorf in 2020, Lucinda Brand outdueling Annemarie Worst in the last lap at Oostend, and Vos outsprinting Brand in Fayettevil. So many S-tier races!
Last year was notable because it was the first time in forever where you could not with any shred of credibility say that the Elite Women’s Worlds race was better than the Men’s. And it is against that backdrop of banger after banger that Fem van Empel’s winning margin of 1:20 really stood out.
It was fait accompli that Mathieu van der Poel was going to win, with the only real question being if the race would be interesting for any measurable period of time. It was not, and Van der Poel won by a comfortable 37 seconds.
The two dominant wins by the Dutch masters got me wondering if these Worlds were the least compelling among those held in the modern (read: the women have a race and Cyclocross24 has results) era. I know it’s been a while since we have done this, so how do we do this … ah yes, let’s go to the numbers!
Cyclocross Worlds Winning Margins
There have been a total of 25 World Championships held since the Elite Women’s race was introduced in 2000. That gives us a decent number of events to base this analysis on.
There are two ways of looking at this. The first is the average winning margin in the two Elite races. However, devotees of the Zach Schuster Content System dating back to the CXHairs blog days know that I am not a fan of averages because they are too easily skewed by outliers.
I much prefer the median, but in this situation with only two data points in each yearly dataset, the median is … the average.
One need to look no further than Valkenburg Worlds to see the average’s shortcomings illustrated.
That weekend was the site of the Compton-Cant banger that was much closer than the 12-second winning margin suggested. No one would deny that race was all kinds of compelling.
It was also the weekend of an utter beatdown delivered to Mathieu van der Poel and all the other hapless souls who dared face him down in the mire of that muddy morass. Van Aert won by a crazy 2 minutes, 12 seconds, giving a very uncompetitive average winning margin of 1:12.
Bor. Ring. Right? Except that it wasn’t.
A better metric, I think, is the minimum of the two victory margins. This tells us how close the closer of the two races was. A high minimum means that the races were not that close at all.
Across the 25 years we have winning margins for, Mathieu van der Poel’s 37-second win made for the second least-close Worlds of this millennium. Only Richard Groenendaal’s 38-second win at Sint-Michielsgestel (say that 5 times fast) in a year where the Elite Women’s margin was 57 seconds was a less compelling more compelling race.
If you found yourself not being super compelled by this year’s World Championships races, the winning margins suggest you were warranted in not being compelled. The margins of victory for Fem van Empel and Mathieu van der Poel were near record-setting among races held this millennium, and Van Empel’s winning margin was the 2nd-highest in Elite Women’s history, second only to Marianne Vos’s 1:34 margin at Louisville Worlds.
There are a few more nuggs we can likely squeeze out of the data. I was also curious what the odds of getting a last-lap banger from the Women, Men, or at least one of the two races are, historically speaking. I arbitrarily picked a margin of 5 seconds to define a “banger,” knowing full well that both the 2018 Valkenburg and 2019 Bogense Women’s races don’t quality under this criteria.
If someone wants to go back and do a more subjective banger assessment by re-watching all the races, I am definitely here for the true banger tally.
In the last 25 years, here are the banger tallies:
Men: 40% (10 of 25)
Women: 32% (8 of 25)
At Least One: 64% (16 of 25)
Extended this out to 10 seconds, the Elite Men’s races don’t change, but the Women’s percentage bumps up to 40%.
This seems kind of interesting(?) because the perception has been that the Elite Women’s races are super compelling while the Elite Men’s are snoozefests (I’m looking at you, Slow Ride Podcast). Subjectively, the 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2015 Elite Women’s races were all bangers, while the 2024, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017 Elite Men’s races were all kind of meh.
The 25 years of the modern era are bookended by the 2000 and 2024 snoozefests, and the years to be there appear to be 2006 in Zeddam, Netherlands, where Erwin Vervecken beat Bart Wellens by 2 seconds and Marianne Vos eked out a sprint against Hanka Kupfernagel, and 2007 where Vervecken beat Jonathan Page by 3 seconds and Maryline Vassal Salvetat beat Katie Compton by a second.
(I begrudgingly admit that this is a situation where the average is useful. We’re all not perfect, ok.)
For funsies, I decided to look at every Elite Men’s winning margin dating back to 1950—just because it’s a more complete dataset—to see how recent results compare to historical results, and I think I may have found the source of our perception that cyclocross is not delivering a good banger percentage as of late: the 2000s were really exciting!
Seven (!) of the Elite Men’s races and four of the Elite Women’s races were decided by 5 seconds or less. When many folks in Cyclocross Nation were getting into the sport, Worlds were super exciting with the likes of Sven Nys, Erwin Vervecken, Bart Wellens, Lars Boom, Niels Albert, and others duking it out and the era of Marianne Vos winning all the things only starting to take hold.
Looking at finishes under 5 seconds by decade for the Elite Men, the 2000s stand out as an anomaly. Removing the 2000s (or including it, because median), the median number of sub-5-second finishes by decade is just 2. Extending that margin out to 10 seconds, the 1990s also had a high number of close finishes in the Elite Men’s races, so let’s call it one pretty good and one pretty great decade of Worlds races for the Elite Men in relatively recent memory.
So yes, using Cyclocross Worlds as a proxy, ‘cross is perhaps not as compelling as it was in the 2000s, but at least it’s not the 1960s where 3 of the Worlds races has margins over 2:30 or 1979 where records show that Albert Zweifel won by over 4 minutes.
History Check
As Mathieu van der Poel continues to rack up Worlds wins and move precipitously close to the all-time Worlds records, it is as good a time as ever to check how his record stands up against the all-time greats.
(I am loathe to toot my own horn, but I think this was a pretty good look at Van der Poel vis-a-vis Erik De Vlaeminck from 2021o when he had a mere four World Championships to his name, if I do say so myself.)
The same goes for Fem van Empel. Not even an Elite by age, how does she stack up in the history of the Elite Women’s Worlds race? And to continue a hobby horse I staked out after Worlds last year, it’s as good as time as ever to reboot the Lucinda Brand Appreciation Tweet.
Scoring systems are arbitrary, and I settled on an approach similar to Jeff D. assigning twice the number of points to a win as a 2nd and making a 2nd worth twice as much as a 3rd. So 8-4-2.
Using these metrics, here are the current top 10 for the Elite Women and Elite Men:
Elite Women
Elite Men
Van Empel checks in at 8th despite not yet being racing age 23, and Brand sits in 4th on the heels of her string of 7-straight Worlds podiums. Her podium streak bests Sanne Cant’s 5 straight from 2015 to 2019 and is one shy of Marianne Vos’s 8 straight from 2008 to 2015 (she may or may not have won 6 of those). The Men’s record also appears to be 8 straight for France’s Andre Dufraisse from 1951 to 1958.
Van der Poel’s sixth Worlds win puts him in the rarest of rare company, with Dufraisse and Zweifel beating him out by their total number of Worlds podiums. If Van der Poel gets his Men’s-record-tying 7th Worlds win next year in Lievin, France, he will ascend to our list based on the arbitrary point system.
He will, of course, need two more wins and a podium finish to equal the lofty standard Marianne Vos has set, so keep racing that cyclocross, plz and ty.
Certainly not unobtainable and probably more contingent on his desire to keep chasing cyclocross jerseys versus physical ability.
Other Odds and Ends
While looking at the results, I was thinking about how Joris Nieuwenhuis has only won a handful of Elite races and is now a Worlds podium finisher. I figured his tally had to be the lowest among the Elite Men this millennium—I was right—and wondered who could have the second lowest haul of wins while also sporting a Worlds podium on their palmares.
The record of races available at Cyclocross24 appears to be pretty complete, so similar to the winning margins, this analysis is limited to podium finishers since 2000 for both the Women and Men.
It turns out that for the Men, Joris is the low man in the clubhouse with 5 wins. Rob Peeters, who finished 2nd in 2012, is next with 8, and then our man Tom “Pidders” Pidcock is next with 10.
Lots of good stuff here. It’s interesting and a full 25% of Jonathan Page’s career wins were at U.S. Cyclocross Nationals, and Eli Iserbyt is making a run at being the Belgian Francis Mourey, aka the dub machine without very much Worlds hardware.
The Elite Women’s is also shared for completeness, although it is safe to argue that many of the names near the top (bottom) of the wins list are not really household names, even in the vaunted Cyclocross Nation.
I hope this was an enjoyable look at an otherwise less-than-compelling Worlds. It was fun to be back crunching some numbers and doing Cyclocross Math.
Joris was a gift this season... Two questions... 1) What do you think the impact of equipment is making in the modern era (not intended to slight MvdP as a beast)? 2) Does the WC need to choose a more challenging venue that removes a specific riders ability to dominate (understanding it would be impossible to achieve, in totality...) based on a skill set that matches the course (I.e. a fast course that favors TT like ability to lay down power)? Something maybe more technical where riders must take risk to close a margin, etc....? Think like Zonhoven... And, excuse my ignorance - I just came to the sport in 2015...