Which bit do you feel I've gone too far with? As far as I can see there's three things here that could be seen as US-bashing.
The first is the bit about the "if this happens, I'm moving" gag which seems to happen every election, I was trying not to trip the political wire whilst also making a joke at the timing of this, given Chloe has very much nailed her political colours to the mast. Not intended as a bash.
I did perhaps disparage the status of the US domestic calendar, but given the way other pros have dominated it in the past I don't feel that that's unfair; while the top riders are top riders regardless, the depth is not as great as Chloe would be facing with Canyon-SRAM at most events. The US races are at the same kind of level as European non-WWT events like, say, the BeNe Tour or Graciá-Orlová, they could reasonably be at the level of events like Thüringen given time, but obviously geographically they're a bit out of the way so they don't tend to bring too many Euro teams across; like Katie Hall and Mara Abbott before her, Chloe has clearly outgrown that scene and I feel we should be seeing her face off against the likes of van Vleuten, Vos and Deignan regularly at this point in her development.
The other bit, perhaps the most obvious one, is the bit about the myopic 'USA! USA!' fans. There are a few riders who seem to have enthused the patriotic fan more than others. In some respects I find that kind of bemusing. Mara Abbott and Kristin Armstrong certainly both attracted a lot of cheering from American fans who seemed to be
only fans of their chosen rider as the sole representative of American pride. It seemed to mostly apply to the riders who stayed dominating in the American calendar however, as the same fans didn't seem to latch onto Evelyn Stevens or Megan Guarnier in the same way. Not even Katie Hall, who I thought would have been the successor to Abbott in that respect, having a mountain-biased skillset and coming over to Europe late after smashing people in North America for a few years. Coryn Rivera does get a
bit of that, but Chloe seems to inherit that mantle. I'm not really sure why, it's hard to really put a finger on who will or won't get that kind of following. If it was based on success, then Guarnier should definitely have attracted that kind of fandom. If it was based on familiarity from home races, I can't understand why Hall didn't get it. If it was based on patriotism, then I can see why they might have latched on to Dygert, but Abbott is almost totally politically opposite to Dygert, so there doesn't seem consistency in it.
Also, Stevens and Hall are two of my favouritest American riders and they didn't get that kind of support, so I resent it
