Cyclo-cross as a Winter Olympic Sport

[Bolder]

I think it worked fine from a sporting perspective, certainly no less exciting than a mud race. The nice thing is that when people went down they didn't get hurt. And the women's race was quite good, might have been even better with Worst.

The larger question is participation by countries, so it doesn't look like the Flanders regional championship. I guess you could limit participation by anyone with a "van" in their surname.

 

[lemon cheese cake]

It definitely showed it is capable of taking place at the winter olympics, and with the snow, a flastfield could be changed quite dramatically into something interesting (whether UCI rules would technically allow that). However I still feel there are other ways in which cyclocross can be globalised. I think the criteria that's been stopping the discipline from being considered is it must take place on snow. Yes, yesterday showed it was 100% capable (as have all the other events, like past events including Lille, Hoogeheide and Kalmthout) of taking place on snow, but the brilliance of CX is it can take place on pretty much any terrain in any conditions. We see fast flat races that provide decent action, but at the same time deep modders can be good to watch as well. If you go and look at non-UCI events that still follow the roots of cx (supposedly a bunch of french farmers racing across each others fields to get to somewhere as quick as possible) then the 3 Peaks CX in Yorkshire shows the versatility of the sport. Firstly the diverse terrain can mean some riders perform better in some conditions than others, meaning that an olympic event on snow would rule out some riders immediately because they don't ride as well in those conditions. Secondly, the uci might try to skew the event to be focused on the winter olympics, by trying to make it into a snow sport.

tldr:
Yesterday's racing in Val di Sole was good, but I feel the sport shouldn't try hard to make it into the Winter Olympics. Snowy conditions made half decent racing, but so do the other conditons CX takes place in.

 

[Logic-is-your-friend]

The problem is that not being an Olympic discipline is holding the sport back from reaching global interest/appeal. Before XC turned Olympic, this was far less of an issue, with Swiss, German, Czech, French, Italian, Dutch, Austrian, Belgian... top riders.

Obviously the sport doesn't need a snow course to be interesting, but it does need a snow course to considered an Olympic discipline. And without that, since 1996, it will stay a Belgian-Dutch gettogether.

It is the stupendous narrow-mindedness of the IOC, that has this asinine condition. As if the rest of the world, where it doesn't snow, can not have a specific wintersport. As if cold, rain, mud... are summer conditions. I will laugh my ass off when climate change soon enough will force most of the so called wintersports, to be held on artificial terrain. Which basically undermines the entire premise, since if artificial terrain is allowed, then there is no reason to withhold CX from becoming an Olympic discipline to start with. It is possible to ski without snow (even without artificial snow) so it should also apply to CX then. Not every CX track needs snow, just provide artificial snow on the Olympics.