Anyone who has followed our National Championships coverage over the years is familiar with Cyclocross Magazine's Nationals effort. Our team hits the venue in time to cover the very first title race, strives to cover each jersey race in comprehensive fashion, and bring you coverage with some live Tweets of race updates and photos, followed by timely reports, results and racer interviews.
While appreciated by many, our focus on the thirty odd title races is far from a perfect process. Beyond sleep, what is often sacrificed is a comprehensive look back at a single title race beyond the Elites either in words or photos. As any race photographer can relate to, we run around trying to capture key moments, racers and scenes from the day's races, and quickly select a few images for social media during the race, and for reports just after.
Sadly, once the report is done and a few images are up, the rest of the hundreds or thousands of files are relegated to just being gigabyte-consuming collections of ones and zeros that never see the light of day. We have no idea if they're even worth sharing, because they simply aren't viewed. That's the reality of a Nationals race day schedule, but still falls short of all that we hope to deliver.
For me, this has been a recurring pattern, and a relatively disturbing one. What good is all the effort if you don't even have a sense of whether the effort amounted to anything worthwhile?
For today's Throwback Thursday look at the 2016 Asheville Cyclocross National Championships, I dug up my files to refresh my own memory of the event, and to finally see what I actually captured. What I found were lots of unprocessed forgotten files—many crappy ones—and a few of which could be worth sharing.
What follows are a 19 images from Sunday's racing at the Biltmore Estate, with the Junior 15-16, 17-18, U23 Women's races, Junior 17-18 and U23 Men's races and Elite Women and Men. Most of them have never appeared in any our coverage. Hopefully they'll bring readers and racers back to one of the more memorable USA Cycling Cyclocross National Championships events we've been to.
See the Asheville photos in the slideshow below. Enjoy such photo galleries? Should we bother to surface other unseen photos from Asheville and other events? Let us know in a comment below—we promise to try to avoid taking a year to share most of our 2017 Hartford National Championships images.
A Throwback Thursday Look at Sunday's Races at the 2016 Asheville Nationals:
Behind Tobin Ortenblad, many U23 felt like they were going backwards at the short, steep foot-eating run-up after the barn. A look back at the 2016 Cyclocross Nationals’ final day. © A. Yee / Cyclocross Magazine
