Cyclocross Vibe Check: Elite Women's Domestic Pre-Season Rankings

Get reacquainted with the top Elite Women in North America with our new bit

Back in the day when baseball games were like cool and stuff, one of the cliches about going to a game was the folks at the entrance yelling “Programs, programs, get your programs.” Cliche aside, if you actually bought one of the programs, they actually proved to be pretty useful. You could read the stories about the players, catch up on stats, and generally while away the time during pre-game batting practice. It also made the games a bit more enjoyable, knowing who’s who and all that.

In a similar way, we are on the verge of walking into the new cyclocross season. GO Cross is less than two weeks away, and it’s been a while since U.S. Nationals and the World Championships in Fayetteville, so it seems like as good a time as any to get reacquainted with the best cyclocross racers in North America.

One approach for doing this would be to do a list of a bunch of riders and order them in, say, alphabetical order. That would accomplish the goal of providing a “program” of sorts, but it falls short of our ongoing goal at the Bulletin to make domestic cyclocross more interesting. Thus, the only logical way to do this is some sort of RANKINGS.

Power Rankings are certainly one way of doing this, but that’s more of a Bill thing with the CX Heat Check Power Rankings. There’s also like the Hot 100 they do for songs. Thinking about it, ranking the top 100 cyclocross racers in North America could get kind of interesting—Congrats Kings CX t-shirt guy, who are the 52nd-ranked cyclocross racer in America.

After giving it some thought—probably for like 5 minutes during a ride the other day—I came up with this year’s new bit: The Cyclocross Vibe Check (which I am pretty sure I stole from Maxx Chance, but whatever).

What is a Vibe Check? Yeah, IDK. It sounds cool, that’s definitely going for it. Who doesn’t like vibes?

Right now, I am feeling a mixture of rankings and whatever else we are vibing on in the cyclocross world. Will it work and be a regular thing? Who knows! But for now, it’s a chance to get to reintroduce ourselves to the domestic ‘cross peloton.

Kicking off the Cyclocross Vibe Check are the Elite Women’s pre-season rankings.