Women's Way-Too-Early 2021 North American Cyclocross Rankings
We prognosticate and speculate about the Elite Eight Women for the coming season
If everything goes to plan, we are currently 153 days away from the start of the 2021 North American cyclocross season (but who’s counting, of course). With cyclocross season a mere 11 fortnights away, it’s never too soon to start thinking about Go Crosses, Jingle Cross, Trek CX Cups, and all the events that make up this coming season’s domestic calendar.
At the completion of the NCAA Tournament every April, publications such as ESPN celebrate the occasion by looking forward to the next season with their Way-Too-Early-Top-25 rankings. College basketball has quite a bit of turnover with players going pro, freshmen coming in, and transfers easier than ever. The exercise is one based a bit on past performance and a lot on projection and speculation.
Inspired by a season where my beloved Illinois Fighting Illini were officially BACK (but left off next year’s WTE Top 25, wtf?), we compiled a Bulletin version of the Way-Too-Early North American Cyclocross Rankings. Racing for the 2021 season is just getting underway, so it made sense to release our rankings now before we have too many race results to feed into the old algorithm—it would be a shame if these projections were too factual.
For the first-ever Way-Too-Early North American Cyclocross Rankings, we present our Elite Eight of North American cyclocross racers. The rankings are based on some combination of 2019/20 results, 2020/21 results for riders who raced, career trajectory, and a special sauce of intangible factors.
As a caveat, I am aware some of the college basketball references in this post are specious at best. I tried, okay.
8. Caroline Mani
One of the reasons March Madness is so compelling is you never know when a player is going to go off and carry their team to the Final Four. These x-factors are part of what makes the game so much fun. Arizona’s Aari McDonald carrying her team to this year’s title game and Arike Ogunbowale leading Notre Dame to the championship in 2018 with two Final Four game-winning shots are two recent examples that come to mind.
Caroline Mani is the first member of our Elite Eight as the mercurial x-factor in North American cyclocross. When the French native and Colorado resident is on, she’s on, and a threat to be one of the top riders on the North American scene. To harken to another piece of CXHairs Bulletin intellectual property, Mani is an ultimate Heat Check cyclocross racer.
After a tough 2018/19, Mani found stability in 2019 and had a solid season that included 8 domestic podiums. Mani did some mountain biking last summer, but based on the last few years, she enters this coming season as a question mark, and thus she garners a somewhat speculative spot at number 8.
7. Jenn Jackson
The first Canadian on the WTENACXR also happens to be one of our favourite Canadians in Jenn Jackson. A bit of a poor Canuck’s Candace Parker (Parker is an all-time women’s hoops great who didn’t play basketball until the 8th grade), Jackson is a late bloomer in cycling after starting her athletic career as an elite cross-country skier. Jackson, however, has made up for lost time and continues to be an athlete on the rise. (TBD if she’s going to publically treat Shaq, however).
Jackson’s big coming-out moment was at the 2018 Pan-American Championships, where the plaid-clad Ontario native finished 5th behind a who’s-who of North American cyclocross. Jackson translated that success into a strong 2019 campaign where she finished 5th again at Pan-Ams and took 2nd at Canadian Nationals.
While Jackson is big into cyclocross, mountain biking pays the bills for her right now. Jackson participated in the brief 2020 UCI Mountain Bike season and finished a career-best 28th at Worlds in Italy. Jackson has also spent part of the pandemic racing on Zwift, where she recently earned an upgrade to Cat A—make what you will of that—and she also gets the podcast bump thanks to the Canuck Crosscast she hosts with our second-favourite Canadian, Michael van den Ham. Jackson’s mountain biking season kicks off soon, so it won’t be long until we get a look at her continued progression as a cyclist.
Jackson takes the seventh spot in the rankings, thanks in part to our sixth-place rider taking a 4-2 advantage in the 2019 season. Jackson showed huge flashes of promise at the 2019 U.S. World Cups before slowing down a bit and then finishing strong. If she can hold the form she has shown at times, a Pan-Am podium and even a major challenge to Maghalie Rochette’s run of dominance at Canuck Nats is not out of the question.
Oh, and bringing back the plaid kit probably wouldn’t hurt…
6. Madigan Munro
Long-time college hoops analyst Dick Vitale, love him or hate him, long ago coined the term “Diaper Dandy” for an outstanding freshman player. One of cyclocross’s top Diaper Dandies is Madigan Munro, who just turned 19 a few weeks ago. Munro’s breakout moment came at the 2018 Louisville Cyclocross Nationals, where she finished 4th overall in the Junior/U23 Women’s race and then went on to represent Team USA at Bogense Worlds.
After racing a full season against the Elites in 2019/20, Munro took home 3rd at the 2020 World Championships in Dubbendorf to become just the third-ever U.S. woman to podium at the World Championships. Her success in her first full season of racing ‘cross earned her a spot on the Trek Factory Racing CX team, which allowed her to race in Europe last winter. She made the most of the opportunity, finishing 15th at the Dendermonde World Cup and finishing 11th in her first U23 Worlds. Munro has already kicked off her 2021 season on the mountain bike at the season-opening US Cup series races.
As an insanely talented young woman who is only going to get better every year, Munro was the toughest to slot in for these rankings. She takes the sixth spot here, but we would not be surprised to see her moving up into podium contention before the end of the coming cyclocross season.
5. Courtenay McFadden
While the UConn Huskies and the Tennessee Lady Vols have historically gotten a lot of the attention in Women’s college basketball, there are a number of other solid programs such as Stanford, Notre Dame, and Texas, to name a few, that have been consistently good year in and year out.
Like those programs, Courtenay McFadden has established herself as one of the most consistent and underappreciated performers in North American cyclocross during the last half-decade, and in 2019 she had arguably her best season yet, just narrowly missing out on a podium finish in front of a home crowd at Lakewood Nationals. How consistent is McFadden? She has finished 4th four straight times at the Pan-American Championships.
Another late bloomer at the sport’s highest level, McFadden experienced much of her success with severe hip pain that she has recently corrected via consecutive surgeries. While McFadden is admittedly the fifth-year senior on this list, her continued improvement and consistency cannot be discounted, and if we are being honest, few riders deserve a podium finish at Pan-Ams, Nationals, or both more than McFadden.
4. Katie Clouse
It’s been said that all Katie Clouse does is win championships. Not that anyone is counting, but even with a lost year, the count is at 31. Clouse is to cycling what the Pat Summit Era Tennessee Volunteers Era was to women’s college basketball. From 1987 to 2008, Summit’s teams won 8 National Championships and made 15 Final Fours. The only thing standing in the way of more championships for the Lady Vols was Geno Auriemma’s UConn Huskies (we’ll get to them), and we will just say that we would love to see nothing more than Clouse and Munro developing a rivalry to rival that of the Huskies and Lady Vols.
Clouse enters her third season of U23 racing this year, but she has long since graduated from Diaper Dandy to PTPer (Prime Time Player). Clouse’s position at number 4 is a bit projective, as we have not really seen her race much since the 2020 U23 Cyclocross World Championships, where she finished 4th in the U23 Women’s race in her first year as a U23. Clouse has focused on her studies at Colorado Mesa University, but she is getting ready to rev it up with Rally Cycling racing in Europe coming soon.
Like Clara Honsinger, Clouse is a young athlete who chooses to keep a low profile despite having literally everything to be cocky about, and Bill and I are always surprised when we encounter ‘cross fans who are not familiar with Clouse’s oeuvre. As Bulletin faithful, we assume you celebrate Clouse’s entire catalog, but if you don’t, learn the name because her Natty title is not stopping at 31.
3. Becca Fahringer
In 2009, Tony Bennett took over a Virginia Cavalier basketball program that had made two NCAA Tournaments since the mid-1990s. Beginning with the 2013/14 season, the Cavaliers steadily improved to become one of the best teams in the ACC and the country.
In the 2017/18 season, Bennett had his best team yet. They had Kyle Guy, they had Ty Jerome, they had D’Andre Hunter, and they went 17-1 in the ACC and 31-2 overall heading into the NCAA Tournament. Then, on a March night every college basketball fan will remember, the Cavaliers became the first-ever #1 seed to lose their first-round game when they got trounced by the University of Maryland-Baltimore County Terriers. It was devastating, and perhaps catastrophic for the program.
The next season? The Cavaliers won the National Championship.
Becca Fahringer will be the first to admit that her 2020/21 season was calamitous. Like Bennett’s run of success, Fahringer started racing cyclocross seriously in 2013, and since then, she had experienced continued growth and success that progressed to a 2nd-place finish at Lakewood Nationals in 2019. That growth seemingly stopped as Fahringer struggled to race at the level she expected this past season.
Placing Fahringer on this list was admittedly a challenge. One could look at her results and notice that in the most recent season, Maddie Munro beat her head-to-head 5-4. Should Fahringer drop out of her podium spot and down to 6 or 7?
We here at the Bulletin are optimists, and we think Fahringer is more 2018/19 Virginia than, say, the Tennesee Lady Vols post-Pat Summit. Are we saying Fahringer is going to win the U.S. Natty this year? Although she did beat Clara Honsinger in a gravel race recently, such predictions are outside the purview of the WTENACXR.
We will, however, go out on a limb and say we fully expect Fahringer to be BACK in 2021.
2. Maghalie Rochette
Astute followers of Women’s College Basketball likely noted, dude, if you’re talking about winning championships, how can you pick Tennessee over UConn? The answer? I needed UConn for Rochette, mmmkay.
While the Tennessee Volunteers were incredible under Pat Summit, their success has been eclipsed by the UConn Huskies of Geno Auriemma. Beginning with the 1995 Women’s Championship, Auriemma and the Huskies won 11 National Championships over the next 21 seasons. During that time, players for Huskies were some of the all-time greats, including Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Rebecca Lobo, and Maya Moore.
If you do the math above, you’ll note the Huskies have not won a National Championship since 2016. From the 2013/14 season through that 2106 title, the Huskies went 116-1 and won 3 national championships. However, they have stalled out in the Final Four the last four seasons, including this recent one where they lost to an upstart Arizona team.
The UConn analogy works almost too well for Rochette. If we had done these rankings any time before World Cup Namur last December, Rochette would be number one. During the 2018 and 2019 domestic seasons, Rochette won pretty much ALL THE THINGS. She won Pan-Ams and Canadian Nats in 2018, and then won the 2019 Jingle Cross World Cup, Pan-Ams, and Canadian Nats in 2019.
While Rochette has nothing left to prove on the domestic scene, Europe has proven a tough nut to crack for the gregarious Quebecois. Things were going well for Rochette this most recent season until a freak accident at the start of Superprestige Gavere twisted her ankle and caused an injury she really struggled to bounce back from. And while Rochette was grimacing and fighting on despite her injury, Clara Honsinger did her thing and stole the hearts of cyclocross fans across the continent.
While UConn has “struggled”—as if making the Final Four is struggling—in recent years, they still have the player of the year in freshman Paige Brueckers, so they are more likely than not to win a National Championship soon. Like UConn, Rochette is loaded with talent, and she excels at North American racing, so we would be zero surprised if she quickly takes back the North American crown. And we certainly wouldn’t say no to Rochette and Honsinger establishing a rivalry reminiscent of the glory days of UConn versus Tennessee.
1. Clara Honsinger
Back in the days before freshmen would arrive on campus with years of hype and the expectation that they enter the starting lineup from day 1, athletes used to have to put in their time behind the upperclassmen before earning a spot in the starting lineup.
Clara Honsinger is a throwback athlete from that era when players had to earn their spot. In an era where social media is ascendent, Honsinger has taken a low-key approach to becoming the first new American national champion since the early 2000s and one of the best female cyclocross racers in the world. Thoughtful and incisive when she analyzes her racing, Honsinger is still a grinder out on the course.
With Katie Compton’s career winding down, Honsinger calmly stepped into that role of underclassman understudy taking over for the senior star at a time the U.S. cyclocross nation wondered who would step in to carry the torch for the undisputed GOAT. True to form, after her breakout second-place finish at World Cup Namur, Honsinger calmly paid homage to Compton in a post-race interview in a brief moment that added to the already growing legend of Clara.
In internal discussions, the Bulletin panel was split about the Clara v. Maghalie decision for number one. One side pointed to Rochette’s dominance of the domestic scene in 2019, while the other pointed to the most recent season where the Bulletin became the CNN (Clara News Network). In the end, it was hard to deny what Honsinger accomplished against the best in the world, including a fourth-place finish at the World Championships in Oostende.
That said, North American racing is generally faster and drier than the European conditions where Honsinger is able to get “going hard when the going gets hard,” so she has her work cut out for her in adding some speed to her impressive skillset because there is no question Rochette is going to come into the fall with a feverish desire to represent for Team Canada in the North American rivalry.
For now, however, five months from the start of the domestic cyclocross season, Clara Honsinger is the BWOTNACXC (Big Woman on the North American Cyclocross Campus).