Elite Women's World Championships Preview

Fem? Puck? Shruggie.

Last season we got a taste of what the trio of young Dutch women can do, with Fem van Empel winning a World Cup and Puck Pieterse and Shirin van Anrooij consistently finishing on podiums. This season, they wasted exactly zero minutes in showing that the youth takeover of international cyclocross was in full effect.

Van Empel won the two U.S. World Cups and 8 of her first 9 races this season. Pieterse won her first World Cup, and then 3 more. Van Anrooij won her first World Cup, and then she also won 2 more. They combined for a total of 27 wins during the season, with Van Empel leading the way with 13.

With these wins came great battles between the young stars. The most recent one came at World Cup Benidorm, where Van Empel beat Pieterse in the last few hundred meters of the race. World Cup Dublin was a banger. Beekse Bergen was a banger. Maasmechelen was a banger. You kind of get the picture.

By age, the Dutch trio of wunderkinds are U23 riders, but clearly by results they are not only Elite but ELITE. However, the question throughout the season was which combination of the young stars would be racing Elites at this weekend’s World Championships in Hoogherheide.

Van Empel made it clear from early on that she would be leveling up to the big show. About a month ago, Pieterse also made the decision to race Elite Worlds. The last remaining holdout was Van Anrooij, who ultimately decided to race in the U23 race, as is her right to do.

There will be no repeat of the last-lap banger at Fayetteville between the three women, but chances are still good that Van Empel and Pieterse will be locking handlebars for a battle deep into the race, if not deep into the bell lap.

As we do each year, we preview the Elite Women’s race, with a look at the year’s Stybarmetrics, and since this year is the year of the vibes, hopefully we will have a brief CX Vibe Check - Worlds Edition to get a feel for those intangibles.

Puck? Fem? Who’s going to win Worlds? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ © Ethan Glading

The Stybarmetrics

The term sabermetrics was coined by baseball writer and mathematician Bill James. It refers to advanced analytics applied to the game of baseball. James was ahead of his time, bringing analytics to baseball long before the Moneyball A’s and Nate Silver’s PECOTA system.

My day job is water resources engineer, so I have always been partial to numbers and math, so I think it was probably my destiny that some kind of numbers-based system would make it into my cyclocross commentary. Back in late 2019, early 2020, we developed the idea of doing advanced metrics applied to cyclocross. The result was the Cross Metrics, which I first described in a blog post on the cxhairs.com website. Last year, Bill coined the term Stybarmetrics, which I absolutely loved as the play on words our cyclocross statistics needed.

Among the Stybarmetrics that I have come to like the most are:

• OPP - On Podium Percentage (self-explanatory)

• WAPP - Wide Angle Podium Percentage (self-explanatory)

• 80% Rule - Range with 80% of a rider’s results

• Variability - Mean difference from a rider’s median result

• Bad Legs Day Percentage - Percent of races with results 5 or more spots worse than the median result

(For the mathy Bulletin readers out there, I have come to prefer the median over the mean because of the potential for one bad result to throw off the metric. Say, for example, a rider wins 3 races and finishes 21st in the 4th. Their mean finish would be 6th. Does that actually describe the rider’s results? Not really.)

It came up on the most recent Media Pit podcast that the universe you draw your data from is important. For the Stybarmetrics, I have developed a rule of including the World Cup, Superprestige, X2O, Exact Cross, and random one-offs in Belgium and the Netherlands such as Nacht van Woerden. I just feel like results such as Blanka Vas cleaning up in three Toi Toi Cup races this season creates a system of OPP inflation, and since I am a public school guy and not a Harvard grad, we can’t have any grade inflation here.

This year’s Stybarmetrics for a select group of riders are:

You can pick what stands out to you the most, but I think we have to start with the data showing that yeah, Van Empel, Pieterse, and Van Anrooij really were that good. With the exception of Van Anrooij’s 7th at Tabor in her 2nd race of the season and Van Empel’s DNF at Val di Sole, they finished on a podium in every single other race they did. A combined 53 podiums in 55 races, for a composite OPP of 96.4%.

Most exemplary is Pieterse’s perfect OPP. When we did the Stybarmetrics in 2020-21, Lucinda Brand entered Worlds with a 95.7% OPP and finished the season at 92.9 and that kind of seemed like a big deal. Pieterse went and one-upped that impressive season by Brand and low-key finished on the podium in each of her 17 races.

*It is worth noting that Mathieu van der Poel had a perfect OPP in 2019-20 and had a MWP (Mathieu Winning Percentage) of 92%. Van Empel had a FWP of 65% this year, so she still has some work to do, I guess.

We made our picks for Worlds on the most recent Media Pit, but I am guessing some of you folks are still hemming and hawing about the decision between Van Empel and Pieterse, so some further investigation is needed.

This past weekend, Van Empel and Pieterse provided grist for the speculation mill by not racing against each other. Van Empel won at Hamme, and Pieterse took the World Cup at Besancon. Since both won with relative ease, the decision to overreact to World Cup is relatively validated, tbh.

Since that does us no good, we need to go to the head-to-heads.

And the head-to-heads could be closer, but not really. The season series stands at 6 for Van Empel and 5 for Pieterse. Visually, here’s what that looks like.

Like all sports, cyclocross is a game of momentum. Eli Iserbyt will be the first one to tell you that the World Championships don’t care how well you’re racing in October and November. While the overall series points to Van Empel, the momentum meter swings a bit to Pieterse, with the ginger winning 3 the head-to-head in 3 of the last 4.

A closer look at those results, however, blunts the impact of that momentum swing. One race was Val di Sole, where Van Empel crashed out. The next was World Cup Zonhoven, where both women got smoked by Van Anrooij. Pieterse won Dutch Nationals fair and square running and riding through an active floodplain. Then Van Empel won the blazing-fast World Cup Benidorm to capture the season series lead heading into Worlds.

One final note on the head-to-head series is that Pieterse entered Worlds last year with a 13-6 advantage and then won the World Championships.

Based on the cold, hard numbers, your favorite to win the Elite Women’s race at Hoogerheide Worlds is:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When Van Anrooij announced she is racing U23 Worlds, one immediate impact was that the race for 3rd became a hot topic.

On a certain level, it is hard to capture just how wild it is that two former world champions in Ceylin Alvarado and Lucinda Brand and a two-time runner-up in Annemarie Worst have been relative after-thoughts this season and have been given close to a zero-percent chance of winning Worlds on Saturday.

Barring an upset on the order of me actually being healthy and able to race cyclocross next fall, the competition for 3rd is wide open and just as shruggie-worthy as the race for the win.

Looking at OPPs, Brand is at 53%, Alvarado 50%, Betsema 45%, Worst 38%, Van der Heijden 25%. and Vas 25%. Numerically speaking, there is really no separation between Brand, Alvarado, and Betsema when it comes to OPP.

Another (more half-assed) metric I came up with was the Results Score, which is basically a Superprestige scoring—but top tens only—of the World Cup, Superprestige, and X2O series. A score of 10 means a rider won every single race, a score of 9 means on average they finished 2nd, and so on from there.

The Results Scores for the season show a bit more separation between the three, with Alvarado leading the way at 7.5, Brand scoring a 7.0, and Betsema a 6.0. Worst would have no doubt been helped by her four wins in the USCX series, but again, that’s why races from lesser countries (sorry America, France, Czech Republic, Britain, Switzerland, and friends) aren’t considered in the Worlds Preview Stybarmetrics.

I think the last thing we can do is look at who’s coming into Worlds with a hot set of tubulars, at least as it pertains to the race among the relevant riders. Subtracting out finishes of the three Dutch wunderkinds, here’s a look at results for Alvarado, Brand, Betsema, Van der Heijden, and Worst since the beginning of the year.

Viewed this way, results since Baal strongly suggest Alvarado and Brand are the two favorites for 3rd, which makes sense because they are both former world champions! Brand holds the 2023 head-to-head advantage of 4-1 over Alvarado, but if we were to have overreacted to Hamme and Besancon, you better believe the hype would all be behind Alvarado after she crushed Brand by *checks notes* 15 seconds.

Again, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe a slight edge to Brand based on recent results? IDK. Then there’s the ringer Silvia Persico who didn’t have enough results to qualify for our analysis but who does have a few 4th-place finishes, including at the recent World Cup Benidorm.

The Vibes

We are coming up on the tail end of the Year of the Vibes, so it only makes sense to sneak a little vibes-based analysis into this Worlds Preview.

Now I know many out there would argue that Pieterse has vibes because of the entertaining course preview videos she has been releasing, but other riders have done those before and it has not benefitted them on the course.

The vibes we are talking about when it comes to winning Worlds are purely performance-based.

Now two weeks ago, I would have 100% argued that all vibes were with Pieterse. After a solid win at Baal, Van Empel appeared to be on the schneide after finishing 2nd at Koksijde and Zonhoven and *gasp* 3rd at Dutch Nationals. In that Dutch Nationals race, she got smoked by Pieterse, who had won 4 of her last 6 races following that rumble in the rising floodwaters.

Maybe it was more time to heal from her Val di Sole crash, maybe it was the warm Spain weather, but whatever it was, Van Empel’s Worlds vibes did a complete 180 at World Cup Benidorm. Any signs that her stock was a stonk were erased, and she emphatically re-entered the chat for Elite Women’s Worlds champion.

Despite coming up a bit short against Van Empel at Benidorm, I don’t think Pieterse’s vibes have suffered at all, so if you’re looking for the vibes to point the way, I still got nothing.

In that race for 3rd, I think the vibes are with Brand. After suffering a broken hand early in the season and missing a full month of racing in October and November, Brand had to re-calibrate her season and put a focus on the World Championships. She enters Worlds with a recent advantage on Alvarado and a general upward trend since DNFing at Superprestige Boom.

I don’t necessarily want to do this but I will. Father Time stands undefeated, and with Brand turning 34 in July, her days as a top cyclocross number are limited. With young dominance not seen since *checks notes* Wout van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel, there is no guarantee that Brand will be able to compete for a Worlds podium as soon as next season.

Saturday’s race is one of her last shots to snag a Worlds podium and add to her legacy as a cyclocross racer. More often than not in the last several years, Brand has risen to the occasion, so the vibe check says that she will do it one more time and capture a podium finish.

The CX Vibe Check declares the vibes to be with Brand on Saturday. © Ethan Glading

The Elite Men’s Worlds preview should be arriving on Friday. Spoiler alert, the tl;dr is 🤷. We are also hoping to have a Fantasy Worlds contest for Bulletin subscribers, so start thinking about putting your Worlds hot takes to the ultimate test. And by ultimate test, I mean a meaningless contest for clout in a niche community.