The SVENNESS Library

Every SVENNESS video, all in one place

Good morning, cyclocross friends. It’s been a while.

After fifteen years of writing nonstop about cyclocross and mountain biking, it finally caught up with me, and I needed a break and a bit of a reset. I know the Bulletin is supposed to publish weekly, and I apologize for the long stretch of non-productivity.

Although I haven’t been writing every week, I have stayed busy preparing for next season. Between Pan-Am prep and some ambitious race coverage projects, we’re full steam ahead for the 2025-2026 campaign. It’s just the writing part that had me in a figurative rut.

One project I teased last season is now complete. I’ve put together a library of SVENNESS videos.

The episodes have slowly disappeared from Vimeo as music rights change hands, and I wanted to preserve the series for those who continue to get some value out of the project.

For many of you who weren’t following cyclocross in 2012, SVENNESS was a series of videos I created to help explain the unique characteristics of this quirky niche discipline. What started as short video essays concentrating on one feature in a race, and how riders approached that feature, expanded into full-blown race recaps focused on strategy and technique.

Growing up, I played and coached basketball. Breaking down videotape of games became one of my favorite parts of the sport. My goal for SVENNESS was to bring that type of team-sport post-game video sessions to cyclocross. Hit the rewind button. Pause on the key plays. Focus on the Xs and Os.

In 2012, Sven Nys was at the height of his cyclocross powers. In that era, the only way for us in the U.S. to watch races was through pirated feeds of the Sporza and Vier networks. We all became acquainted with Dutch language broadcasts and tricky pronunciations, such as how to pronounce Sven’s last name.

In the U.S., the convention was to pronounce his name as “Nice,” because, as we're reminded all the time, we’re horrible at pronouncing names. Listening to those broadcasts, Sven’s first and last names weren’t pronounced as Sven … Nice, but always said together and mushed into one word. “Sven … Nice” was pronounced Sven-Ness. One word. Flowing together. So these videos were the essence of what Sven was doing on the cyclocross track. His SVENNESS. Flowing together.

Have these videos aged well? I don’t know. But they seemed to have an impact at the time. If you want to rewatch or experience them for the first time, they’re all in the repository I’ve created on Dropbox.

The library includes SVENNESS, Your Moment of SVENNESS, LIKEAVOS (focusing on the elite women’s field), GWENNESS (a short-lived foray into ITU triathlon), CXs and Os (a later video series that goes back to the original intent of SVENNESS and contemplates iconic features at famous race venues), SVENNESS goes to the Olympics (a cross-country skiing video), and a few other odds and ends (including an interview with Sven at CrossVegas in which I fact check some of the things I talk about in the videos with the man himself).

Around the same time the SVENNESS videos came out we released our cyclocross skills book, Skills Drills and Bellyaches. You will see that book advertised in the videos. If you go to the cyclocrossbook.com link, you can still purchase a PDF of the book.

The SVENNESS Library is located here.

Thank you for your continued support.

Happy viewing.