#tbt – Standing Around in the Cold: Supercross 2006
In 2006, our half-baked industry insider cycling blog started to get noticed, probably because we were copying jokes from funnier people. We were suddenly getting press passes for fairly big bike races, like the Tour of Britain. We were approached to write a serious profile of Jan Ullrich ahead of the 2006 Tour, which would’ve been our most prolific writing credit to date if it wasn’t for the fact that he didn’t even make the start line.
And we were asked to go to Macclesfield for a cyclo-cross event. Well, what else were we going to do on Boxing Day? We drove the BMW through the mean streets of Macclesfield with Mighty Crown blasting on the stereo, and mostly just tried to avoid catching a cold.
At one point, Liam Killeen’s mum approached us thinking we were serious journalists because we had a big camera. Yes, those terrible, terrible photos below were taken with an SLR. We gave her a business card with a swear word on it, but she never got in touch.
Lazy Race Report: Supercross 2006
We were the last corner of the internet not writing about cyclo-cross. But that changes today. If it deadens the pain a little, you can always imagine that it’s just a result of our predilection towards all things preceded by the word “super”.
Macclesfield isn’t like the other homelands of cyclo-cross — it doesn’t have the illustrious cycling history of Belgium, nor the lax attitude towards drugs and prostitutes of Holland. What it DOES have is a shopping trolley in a pond and some used needles behind a tree, but that’s not much of a marketable asset really.
When we were kids, riding around a park was easy. Times have changed. The course was very demanding of the riders, with lots of those hills and corners and other things that make us not like riding our bikes. In fact, we were feeling very sorry for the riders after the umpteenth time we watched knackered people ride straight into the posts they were supposed to jump over.
It was like a festival of cycling, which we liked. We weren’t so keen on all the deep section carbon fibre rubbish, but we kind of appreciate that this was one of the few instances where riding a steel fixed gear bike wouldn’t be a good idea. We’re warming to this cyclo-cross stuff, you know (and given the weather conditions for spectating, we never thought we’d be using any variation of the word “warm” in the race report).
Phil Dixon won it with a truly awe inspiring epic ride. Landis’s breakaway in the Tour? Please, this was better. Even the commentator agreed that Dixon’s ride would go down in the annals of history.
Liam Killeen rode hard for second place. We met his mum!
And Rob Jebb got third place. It was all very exciting.
So that was Supercross. And we loved it, even though our fingers got so cold they felt like they might drop off. The traffic on the way home made us Fairlycross, but it was still an excellent day out. 7/10