Meg McMahon
Emma Swartz pushes up a steep, slick climb at the inaugural Women’s World Championship cyclocross race in Huesden-Zolder, Belgium.
When kids who play sports reach a certain age, they often quit because of injuries or new interests. In the case of Emma Swartz, an 18-year-old graduate of Madison East High School, both reasons fit. After “one injury too many” she stopped playing soccer and took up a sport her dad, Andy, encouraged her to try: cyclocross.
Cyclocross?
“It’s hard to explain what cyclocross is,” Swartz, now a freshman at Marian University in Indianapolis, told me last week. It was developed in Europe as a way for road racers to stay fit during the fall and winter and involves riding on pavement and off-road terrain marked with obstacles that require participants to dismount and run while shouldering their bikes.
In 2012 and 2013, the Madison Area Sports Commission helped bring the Cyclocross National Championships to Badger Prairie Park in Verona.
“I think when it’s explained as ‘You bike through a park with a road bike that has mountain bike tires, and sometimes you have to get off and run,’ people assume that it’s an easy type of bike racing. It’s not.”
Swartz should know. She races for Trek Cyclocross Collective, and on Jan. 30, she represented Team USA at the first-ever U23 Women’s World Championship cyclocross race in Heusden-Zolder, Belgium.
“One of the things I love most about cyclocross is that every race is a new kind of challenge,” says Swartz, who also ran cross-country for the Purgolders. “It’s always a different course, with different conditions ranging from bone dry to three inches of mud.”
Conditions at Belgium’s CX Worlds course last Saturday could best be described as wet and demanding.
The messy race was a long time coming. Even though the Switzerland-based Union Cycliste Internationale (sports cycling’s governing body) established an “Under 23” category for men 20 years ago, the U23 women’s division debuted this year.
“Inequalities between men’s and women’s races are a big problem,” says Swartz, who started a $3,000 fundraising campaign via RallyMe to cover airfare, bike transport and other traveling expenses; she ultimately raised more than $4,500. “Women’s cycling has never been much of a priority, and we are lucky that things are starting to turn around.”
Swartz finished 32nd out of 43 riders, completing multiple laps around a short course in 48 minutes and 23 seconds. Racine’s Kaitlin Antonneau raced in the Elite Women’s Division at CX Worlds, finishing eighth with the top American time of 42:15.
