
Beggars Would Ride
More Cowbell
About a year ago, Colin Meagher caught wind that I was procrastinating my way toward starting up an online archive of old Grimy Handshake columns, and in an effort to get me to stop dragging my heels, he sent me a massive file of his photos. “Hope some of these catch your fancy, now get to work, slacker” was the implied kick in the ass behind Colin’s gesture.
Some clarification is necessary here. Colin Meagher has had a long career as one of the hardest working shooters on the circuit, and aside from his rented mule work ethic and his talents behind the lens, he also has a keen eye for the life around the action. He has captured a lifetime worth of beautiful marginalia, the sublime and the arcane, the profound and the comical, and to be bestowed a folder of it is a gift that is beyond value. And, just to underscore this a little more emphatically, Colin has a whole lot of other shit on his plate. He’s a new-ish dad. He’s a husband. And he is now more than 6 years into an ALS diagnosis that would have killed most people a couple years ago. He has better things to do than prod an aging burnout into reluctant action.
I don’t know if I deserve my friends. They are awesome people, I am blessed to know them all, but Colin is a supernova amongst that constellation of goodness. Colin is a better human being than most. He’d balk at that. Too bad. It’s true. If you want a good cry, here’s the story I wrote about him back in 2019.
Aaanyway, in among that raft of images he sent was a folder titled “background noise”, and in THAT folder were the images that are in this column. There is a whole lot of cowbell, and that is fitting, because this is January. And that means cyclocross. And in my mind, cyclocross means cowbells.

Cowbell: By any means necessary.
I just spent every morning in the week leading up to and the week following the new year glued to the laptop, watching hard men and women get medieval in the freezing Belgian mud. I am in Mexico, and the soundtrack of the rising sun outside was of dogs barking and roosters crowing, and every day was guaranteed to be hot and windy, but really, I was in Belgium, trying to maintain my balance in a seething crowd of beer drunk partisan fans as they bellowed their appreciation for their heroes, hurled abuse at their villains, our shouted breath rising together from our massed bodies like steam in a cattleyard. And man, this winter’s kerstperiode was epic. Ugly weather, heavy courses, brutal conditions and hard, hard racing.
I fucking love cyclocross.
Speaking of cyclocross, and friends, that image up there is of Willie K Bullion. Colin shot that at ‘cross nationals in Bend, Oregon, maybe 2010. Willie’s the warranty guy at Santa Cruz Bikes. He’s also one of the first people who befriended me when I moved to Santa Cruz in 1992. We met at a Surf City cyclocross race, and probably tried to stuff each other into the course tape. He’s ringing a massive cowbell made for him by Justin Robinson, one of the most fearsome ‘cross racers to ever come out of Santa Cruz.
Justin and Willie go way back. You can watch Willie motorpacing Justin up highway 1 in Brian Vernor’s film, Pure Sweet Hell. Brian grew up with Justin, and was a Surf City grom long before he grew into his photographic and cinematic talent.
I met Justin the same year I met Willie. Justin was racing juniors, and they raced with the Cat B racers. I was racing Bs. I made the mistake of trying to squeeze Justin out of my way as we both sprinted toward the line at Surf City finals that year. He was just a kid, after all. That was a mistake. Justin stuffed me off his line as casually as a big dog shaking off a tick. That was the closest I would ever get to him in a race, ever. I did not know at the time about how Justin was legendary in Bonny Doon for having once kicked a soccer ball so hard it exploded. Justin was real big and real strong. Even at 17, before he started racking up state and national championships, wearing stars and stripes jerseys at World Championships, and being the gentle giant total badass of Santa Cruz for decades. Some number of years later, Willie would be the coach/manager of the Lemond cyclocross team, Justin would be one of the four powerhouse racers on the squad, and I would be their mechanic. Funny how things work out sometimes.
Oh, and that slender gentleman behind Willie? That’s Rick Hunter. I begged him to move to Santa Cruz back around 1993 because we needed another good mechanic at The Bicycle Trip, and Rick was a real good mechanic. He went on to become a real good framebuilder, and a real good ‘cross racer too. I think he might still have bragging rights as the highest place ‘Murican finisher at England’s legendary Three Peaks cyclocross race.
Every town that has a cycling population has some kind of cycling scene. It might center around a shop, a BMX track, a velodrome, a ski hill, a jump line or the local city limit sign. In Santa Cruz, we were lucky to have several scenes, and the scene-ry has continued grow and flourish as mountain biking branched out into its everythingness. Most mountain bikers think of Santa Cruz in a couple distinct ways: The late, great Aptos Post Office jumps and the explosion of talent that rose out of there, and a sprawling network of nudge-wink trails above the UCSC campus that don’t officially exist, and have not officially existed for decades, but are fervently argued about for all the wrong reasons. There’s a whole lot of mountain biking throughout the county, and while what’s left of Giro and Bell may have been sucked down into Orange County, Ibis and Santa Cruz are still calling Santa Cruz home, along with a fistful of incredibly talented framebuilders, and Fox is right up the hill in the Valley of the Scott. The scenes are still strong. Semenuk likes to winter there for a reason.
If you happened to have moved to Santa Cruz in the 1990s, though, there was one scene where the roadies and the mountain bikers and even the track club runners as well as the velodrome racers from over the hill all came together for three months of glorious autumn-into-winter throwing down: Surf City Cyclocross. If I try to put into words the history and evolution of Surf City Cyclocross, and what it meant to the area, and what it represented to the sport of cyclocross in the US, this would turn into a book. So, I’ll leave it at this: Surf City CX was and still is one of the longest standing cyclocross race series in the country, maybe the longest of all, and it was and is an anchoring point for cyclists of every type, and it was and is where I fully fell in love with the pain and beauty of racing, and it was where I met some of my most solid lifelong friends. Thanks to Surf City, I fell for cyclocross. Hard.

Cowbell: It's what's for dinner.
Surf City Cyclocross set me up with friends who are still tight 30 years later. It catalyzed something about my love for bikes into a fierce devotion, and that set me on the course to writing about bikes for a living. It served as a springboard into the cyclocross community that saw me up to my knees in mud or sliding across the ice from one side of this country to the other. First as a racer, then as a mechanic and finally as a course worker. Because of cyclocross I got to experience European winters. I stood in raucous beer tents, rubbed elbows and wolfed down fries with mayonnaise alongside fans in Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the Czech Republic. I got to fight over pressure washers with stroppy French mechanics in Switzerland, and I had the honor of not having to do anything but stand ready with his spare bike while Matt Kelly stormed through the ice to the first ever US cyclocross World Championship in Poprad, Slovakia.
And everywhere we went, there were cowbells. Lots of cowbells. From Washington to Wetzikon, there would always be fans going nuts with cowbells.

The hills are alive to the sound of... Cowbell.
Mighta been a time and place kind of thing. A lot has changed in ‘cross over the past two and a half decades. Mathieu Van Der Poel, whose father Adri scored the bronze medal in his swansong back in Poprad that year, has along with Wout Van Aert ushered in a new era of power and bike handling prowess. The speeds are blazing fast. Everyone is hopping the barriers all the time, dismounts are often split steps at the last second instead of more choreographed step throughs at higher speed leading into longer runs, and bikes spend far less time on shoulders than they did in times past. Disc brakes, but still plenty of Dugast tubulars running ridiculously low tire pressures. Handlebars beginning to show a little bit of flare. And race coverage to die for. Live feeds, cameras everywhere, visuals so crisp you can almost smell the embrocation.

Nothing like a good old fashioned holiday beatdown, served straight into the living room laptop just in time for Christmas. MVDP keeping the family tradition alive...
The race coverage now is so good that you can see the smoke rasping from the exhausts of the chainsaws without bars being revved in the crowds, you can see the beer sloshing in the cups of the fans. You could even see the cowbells, but... I haven’t seen a single cowbell on the screen yet this winter. Maybe the chainsaws replaced them. Maybe people are too busy trying to crowd over the fencing with their iphones. It still reeks of heresy to me.
You can probably guess where I’m gonna leave this. I will love cyclocross until my dying day. And I will be eternally thankful for the friendships that ‘cross had a hand in bringing into my life, and for the parts of this world that I got to experience with those friends, as we all chased our muddy, frostbitten, burning lunged muse. But damnit, this scene needs more cowbell.
"I mean, really... explore the space!"
Comments
Mark
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Tip of the hat to Colin.
The Radavist has the full version of Pure Sweet Hell on their page or you can watch it on Vimeo.
https://theradavist.com/pure-sweet-hell/
Edit: The page for the Radavist has a link to a write-up on the movie that is pretty cool too.
https://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/01.12.05/psh-0502.html
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Mike Ferrentino
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Good finds, thanks for posting those up. Pure Sweet Hell was Brian's first film, followed by his documentary about working at Santa Cruz Bikes: We Just Work Here. Also worth a watch for a time capsule look at SCB before they got all fancy.
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Cr4w
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Wow he had a lot of Bike magazine covers. That really got me thinking about how much I would look forward to that every month.
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Cooper Quinn
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Aw, those cowbells are adorable - ski racers.
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Deniz Merdano
2 weeks, 5 days ago
We saw these things around the necks of Italian cows in October. They are insanely loud!
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Pete Roggeman
2 weeks, 5 days ago
It's good to know where they are when the fog rolls in up in those hills!
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Dave Smith
2 weeks, 6 days ago
Can't get enough of that cowbell from, Colin Meagher.
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Andy Eunson
2 weeks, 5 days ago
It’s the hardest sport I ever did.
The commentary is comedy gold on this relict https://youtu.be/H9_Fs1QtsOY
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Mike Ferrentino
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Having gone over and suffered through the 3 Peaks, I can attest that things have only very slightly evolved in Yorkshire since 1950. Unique landscape, unique people, unique take on 'cross. "Fell runners." Shudder...
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Merwinn
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Great piece. Love's me some CX. The muddier the better. Benidorm pit crews looked bored. Almost looked more like a dusty crit, than CX. But the speed! Oh la la!
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Mike Ferrentino
2 weeks, 5 days ago
I was really expecting that Benidorm would kinda suck after all the old testament racing over the holiday, but dear god that was some fast, intense racing. Fem Van Empel handles pressure so well, that was a gripping race. And Thibault's attack at the end of the men's race was beautiful. Gotta love it when Wout actually says "chapeau" after a move like that.
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Busy_Bee
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Happy and pleasantly surprised to see CX coverage. This season has been incredible. Especially the women's field! Stoked to see Lucinda and Ceylin (and Annemarie prior to breaking her hand) having a very strong season.
On a local note... the CX scene in Toronto is thriving and possibly growing.
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Mike Moore
2 weeks, 4 days ago
Great piece as per normal, but about that "online archive of old Grimy Handshake columns"...what up?
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Mike Ferrentino
2 weeks, 3 days ago
Did Colin send you here to ask that?
I meant to get something off the ground by April Fool's day last year. Then I vowed it would happen by Decorative Gourd Season. Now I am hopeful that something will bubble to the surface in a month or two.
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heyride
2 weeks, 2 days ago
It brings a smile every time I see Marianne Vos do the step through dismount. One of the last of what I've been told is an old school technique.
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Mike Ferrentino
2 weeks, 1 day ago
It is an old school technique, for sure. 'Cross has changed. I think Danny De Bie was one of the first to start regularly hopping barriers - late 1980s, early 90s. A decade later, about half the pro field were hopping everything. Now, it's rare that top tier riders don't hop them all. So, barriers used to be on a flat somewhere, and you'd be hauling ass at speed toward them, and if you were to dismount, you wanted to dismount into a full run, but try to minimize the number of steps between you, the barrier, and the remount. Stepping through on your way off the bike allows your legs to open into a full, fast stride. There have also been some rule changes (I thiiiink) regarding the number of barrier sections allowed on a course, and the number of barriers allowed in a pack of barriers, so they are not as widely prevalent as they used to be.
Dismounts now are often at places on the course where the speeds have become too slow to stay on the bike - like those mud hills and sand pits - since riders (and bikes) are more capable of riding more stuff at higher speeds. So, if the dismount speed is slower, a step through is cumbersome, takes too much time and room. Split stepping, letting the dismount leg hit the ground behind the still pedaling leg, is faster when the traffic speed is slowing or choking up.
But yeah, a clean step through at high speed is such a beautiful thing to watch.
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Scott Jamieson
2 weeks ago
Hey Mike, heading to Poprad in a few weeks for a business trip. I'll give a wave for ya
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