The Mairiporã World Cup and What It Means for Team USA
Race recap, nation rankings, and Olympics selection criteria all in one post
If you’ve spent time in the corporate world, you are probably familiar with SMART goals. Conceived in 1981 by George Doran, the SMART criteria became a boardroom rallying cry through the 1990s and 2000s and the bane of every worker bee stuck in a cubicle having to explicitly agree to increase their TPS memo output by five percent in the coming fiscal year.
SMART Goals boil down to this:
Specific: target a specific area for improvement.
Measurable: quantify, or at least suggest, an indicator of progress.
Assignable: specify who will do it.
Realistic: state what results can realistically be achieved given available resources.
Time-related: specify when the result can be achieved.
Let’s say you are the Team USA mountain bike office manager in charge of productivity and Hawaiian Shirt Day, and you are reviewing the most recent SMART goal forms submitted by your top athletes for the first weekend of XCO cross country racing in Mairiporā, Brazil; I can imagine they would read something like this:
Specific: secure two spots in the Paris Olympics and make the team
Measurable: finish in the top 10
Assignable: all of us
Realistic: podium spots and wins
Time-related: right now
Most employees' gameplan is to downplay their goals to make them achievable. There’s no sense in shooting for the moon and coming up short. Find something you know is achievable and go about your business.
I want to think that’s precisely what happened in Mairiporā. Savilia Blunk, Haley Batten, Kelsey Urban, Kate Courtney, Gwen Gibson, Maddie Munro, Chris Blevins, Riley Amos and Bjorn Riley went about their business and did what they knew was achievable. There was no shooting for the moon here.
Mairiporã World Cup XCO Cross Country
If you haven’t watched the races, spend some time treating yourself. The highlights are fine, but the racing was exciting from start to finish. Blunk, Batten and Jenny Rissveds battling for the women’s elite race was electric. You had all three fighting for the win, Batten and Blunk fighting for Olympic selection, and Rissveds utterly aware that the other two were looking at each other as much as her and played that card to her advantage. Blunk dangled, Batten crashed, and Rissveds attacked. This race had it all.
This race also had one of the best comeback stories we’ve seen in some time. With apologies to LL Cool J, I will call this a comeback. After taking off most of last season to deal with health issues, Kelsey Urban unleashed a corker of a race in Brazil. She finished eighth on the day, ahead of a charging Evie Richards and Kate Courtney. Urban explains on her Instagram page the journey back to good health and what this result meant much better than I can. It’s worth a read.
The only low point of the day for Team USA was Gwen Gibson’s crash early in the XCO race that left her with a broken collarbone. It’s never a good time for an injury, but Olympic years are crucial for XCO racers, and being unable to fight for a spot in Paris makes this injury even tougher.
Last Saturday in Fayetteville, Christopher Blevins looked human rather than his normal superhuman. After winning the XCO race on Wednesday and the XCC race on Friday, Blevins faltered in Arkansas. Fast forward one week to Saturday’s World Cup XCC race, and Blevins faltered again, falling off the pace and finishing at the back of the field.
The odds of Blevins pulling off a podium spot in the XCO race and meeting those SMART goals were not looking great. After the lights went green and the race started, seeing Blevins wallowing in 33rd place, it looked like the U.S. National Champ's bad stretch might continue. Thankfully, it didn’t.
Blevins fought to the front, and there was more than a flicker of hope that he might be on a good day. When, in the final lap, he was sitting fourth wheel and riding over the boulder at the top of the steepest bit of climbing on the course, you knew he was having a good day. I don’t think anyone, all day long, rode on the left side of the track at the top of the climb. It wasn’t a ridable line. But Blevins rode it. And in retrospect, that’s when you knew it was on.
A minute or so later, Blevins is champing at the bit in third place behind his teammate Victor Koretzky and Filippo Colombo. They are on another steep winding climb, and Blevins tries to pass on an uphill chicane. He gets even with Colombo on the right-hand part of the turn, but Colombo slams the door on him in the second part, forcing Blevins to check up and keep searching for his spot. He showed he had the power to get by; he just needed the right opportunity.
Chris Blevins found that opportunity and not only passed Colombo but also went by Koretzky. I’d love to tell you how it happened, but I can’t. It wasn’t on the broadcast. To the television director’s credit, he at least made it cinematic. In a George Miller Fury Road-type smash cut, we saw Blevins go into the climb in third and (after 10 agonizing seconds of watching the midfield ride around) emerge from the dust in the lead and extend the gap over the chasers to the finish. Although we didn’t get audio from the finish line, I still heard the “let’s effing go” Blevins screamed as he crossed the line from my couch in Washington, DC.
Blevins was the only U.S. rider in the men’s elite field, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. men were otherwise absent. Riley Amos continued his hot streak by winning the U23 race, and Bjorn Riley finished fourth.
The U.S. contingent went second, third, eighth and tenth in the women’s elite. Maddie Munro recovered from an early race crash to finish fourth in the U23 race. Blevins won, and Amos and Riley were first and second in the U23 men’s race.
This day was tremendous and arguably historic or even record-breaking for the U.S. It has been a while since the U.S. has been this dominant. In recent years, Kate Courtney’s world championship and World Cup Series overall crown stand out, but not much more than that.
But to say this weekend is a first for the U.S. would be to ignore history. Let’s take a minute to remember the OGs of World Cup dominance. Specifically, Juli Furtado, Ruthie Mathhes, and Sara Ballantyne on the women’s side and Ned Overend, Jon Tomac, David Wiens, and Tinker Juarez on the men’s side. In the early 1990s, these riders dominated World Cup mountain biking, with Furtado winning three World Cup overalls in a row after finishing second in the previous two years. This current crop of U.S. riders is exceptional, as are the riders on whose shoulders they stand.
Olympic Qualification and Selection
I wanted to finish up this post with a bit more about the Olympics and where things stand for the U.S. team after this weekend. Last week, I talked about how Olympic start spots were allocated and what the U.S. team needed to do to secure the maximum four spots on the start line in Paris. This week, I want to touch on what individual riders must do to secure one of those spots.
Here are the most recent team rankings. Starting with the men, Blevins, Amos and Riley helped the U.S. jump two more spots to sixth in the world, leapfrogging Germany and Great Britain. This gives the squad more breathing room but not the opportunity to rest on their laurels until May 27, when the selections are announced.
MTB Olympic Qualification Men’s Nation Ranking
The U.S. moved into third on the women’s side, knocking the Dutch down to fourth. I don’t see the U.S. women taking their foot off the pedals any time soon, but with the maximum of spots close to locked down, the focus is now 100 percent on who will make the squad.
MTB Olympic Qualification Women’s Nation Ranking
As far as the individual battles go, Blevins and Amos seem secure in earning the Olympic starts, assuming the men hold on to the two spots. Bjorn Riley is the one on the outside looking in, which is tough since he has shown he is among the world's fastest men and deserving of a spot. Especially after finishing second in the Mairaporā Men’s U23 World Cup XCO.
UCI Cross-country Ranking Men’s Elite
Here’s how the U.S. men with UCI points stack up:
For the women, it’s a much more interesting competition for those two Olympic spots. With Batten missing a lot of last season, her ranking plummeted initially (she regained eight spots this week), but she still has shown she can be on a podium and even win races. Courtney is still the highest-ranked U.S. rider but was fourth among U.S. riders in the first round in Brazil.
If we follow the conventional wisdom, there have been four women in this contest: Batten, Blunk, Courtney and Gibson. We may still be at four even though Gibson is sidelined, as Urban raised her hand to be counted. Heck, we may be at five with Munro in the back seat saying, “Hey, don’t forget about me!” This race to Paris is going to get spicy.
UCI Cross-country Ranking Women’s Elite
Here’s how the U.S. women stack up in the UCI rankings:
Now that we know where everybody is ranked, the real question is, does that matter? Is the selection based purely on UCI ranking? Of course, it’s not.
Here are the selection criteria USA Cycling will use to decide who will attend the Olympics. Unlike cyclocross, medal-capable for these athletes is a relevant and worthy criterion.
And here is the World Cup calendar. There are two more World Cup chances to show the selection committee that you deserve the Olympic nod: Araxá this weekend and Nové Město, the final weekend before decision day, May 27.
I’ll be back soon to talk more about round two. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve lowered the subscription price for The Bulletin. My goal is to reach 1000 subscribers by cyclocross season to keep this a viable outlet. I hope you will consider changing from a free to a contributing subscription if you haven’t already. $5 a month. $50 for the year. Thanks.
Quality independent journalism for the price of one coffee a month… that’s way better value than the bikes a lot of people ride or the ridiculous entry fees for marquee events or the price of some bib shorts. C’mon people! PS I love KC as a racer and role model woman athlete.. but it’s got to be Batten and Blunk unless something very strange happens.