The Uplifting Banality of Cyclocross Inflatables

I spent 10 days over the early December season travelling around Belgium and the Netherlands in my van for the UCI Cyclocross World Championship races. We called it CROSSMASS, and it was brilliant.

To introduce the sport, because I’m sure 99% of you are most certainly not here for cycling race reports, I wanted to explore the beautiful banality of the Cyclocross world. It’s a brutal and difficult sport requiring endurance, nerve and skill — I’d be tempted to link it to extreme sports rather than niche sports, but then, does it matter? Not really. What matters is that at Cyclocross races, the sponsors are wonderfully boring. DIY stores. Builder’s merchants. A mayonnaise brand. A bathroom fittings and fixtures superstore. Flooring manufacturers. They are all here, excited to be involved, and they make inflatables to get even more into the batshit bonkers spirit of things.

(NB. I apologise, alt text isn’t yet available on the mobile app version of Substack)

A huge inflatable tin of exterior paint

A huge inflatable yellow bidon

An inflatable tugboat. Pretty cool actually, this is advertising an actual tugboat and salvage yard business.

My person favourite, a giant inflatable bag of cement. Really attractive colour scheme of lime green and neon pink.

The X20 inflatable duck. A Cyclocross mascot and also an advert for a bathroom company.

Exact are also an important sponsor of Cyclocross and have their own race series. They are a cloud IT company, I don’t know what their round, red inflatable is meant to be.

There’s something beautiful to me about something so whimsically banal. It shows me that everyone who watches Cyclocross actually likes fun, no matter how boring life is. Belgian, Dutch, German, French, English, whoever you are and however your nationality apparently dictates your appetite for silliness, everyone at Cyclocross is wearing an X20 duck hat, pointing at a giant inflatable paint tin, getting rained on and watching superhumans hurl themselves up and down muddy hills. Absurd. Amazing.

If you want to watch some of the races this winter, they are on Eurosport and Discovery+, I went to Namur, Hulst and Zonhoven.