Photos Digby Shaw    Words Brett Kennedy

What does it take to cancel a cyclocross race? It’s a question that––at 7am with gale force winds catapulting drops of rain that sound as big as golf balls into glass that surely can’t resist much longer––has only one answer: Nothing can cancel a cyclocross race.

Maybe if this was a regular Hüttcross event we could have stayed in bed. No, that wouldn’t happen either, and this was no regular race. National titles don’t rely on thermals and rain jackets, only we, the weak on the sidelines, do.

Only cold beverages can save us now, and they seem to be the only thing staying warm. Numb the mind and the senses will follow. Can Double Brown taste any worse warm? Someone else will have to determine that one. At least one racer is putting in solid research, lap after lap. The real winners are often found at the back of the pack.

At the front there are more serious matters. Somehow they are made to appear not that important, even with the prestige on offer. Suffering is made to look like fun, but I still don’t want to confirm or deny that it is. The sideline, inhabited by the hoi polloi, is the comfort zone. Never leave the comfort zone.

Some understand, empaphise, they have been there. I have not. They have tried and failed many times, their barbed lures not taking hold, maybe resisted because in some sick and twisted way I know they will sink into flesh and never let go. It seems that’s what has happened to these skin-suited gladiators, whether they realise it or not.

Anja McDonald: Elite Women’s Champion

They come from far and wide for this, as the Romans did. These lions are disguised in a sticky, slippery, seemingly inanimate form, laying dormant with a rapidly disappearing camoflage of flecked green. Harmless though it looks, soon we know it can’t be defeated. Metal and plastic is no match, sinew and muscle barely breaks even.

It never gets easier, you just go slower. There is no speeding up, just relentless repetition, attrition, contrition. If ever there was a sport designed to demoralise and energise one’s spirits concurrently, this is surely it. While they appear broken on the outside, there is a strange joyousness that emanates from each and every one. I may never understand it, they may not either… maybe no-one needs to.

Rob Kilvington: Masters 40+ champion

Brendon Sharratt: Men’s Elite Champion

Champions are decided, perhaps chosen by a higher deity who bestows good fortune from the top of a tall building. Yet somehow, results seem to be secondary to the core values on display. It’s not about the bike, no matter how irrelevant that particular adage may have become, or the bikes themselves, abused, broken, left alone like the red boxes of warm aluminium vessels scattered upon a now-barren wasteland. Only the tape remains, waiting to be rolled and stored away one last time.