At this point in the pre-dawn dark, one assumed that by now there would have been other ways to spend one’s birthday.
But here we were, loading up one last time in the November cold that has long since separated wheat from chaff. Fact is, it’s just plain hard to skip seeing a few hundred of your closest competitors, perfect strangers and all the other familiar faces in this final stretch of our fall campaign. So let’s light that match, burn the candle and leave it all out there for one last waltz.
Sly Fox Cross is the Mid-Atlantic region’s barnburner and it’s either a season-end wrap party or do-or-die Pennsylvania state championship – but hopefully somewhere in-between. This year’s edition was a much-missed reminder of why the spectator-centric event is the ultimate way to close out three months of weekend warfare across the forests and fields of the greater Delaware Valley.
An Outfoxing
Sly Fox Brewing Company’s annual bike race at their Pottstown, Pa. location was first run in 2014 and has been held almost annually since. As promoter Topher Valenti explained, the light bulb moment with bicycle-friendly brewery leadership was piggy-backing off existing Sly Fox spectator-oriented events like, of all things, goat racing. The initial pitch was a bit of a stretch, but Valenti insisted this would be a great opportunity. His logic: Spouses and children are ever-present as supportive onlookers at these types of events, but it’s fall and it’s cold and it’s raining and there are holidays to get ready for and “grass crits” don’t always offer the most compelling views.
The recipe for success then? “It’s the excitement on the hill for both spectators and racers,” he said. There’s a DJ spinning real reggae vinyl, brewery guests unsure of what in the world they just wandered into and a truly bizarre costumed single-speed race. It’s dollar bills dangling from clothes pins that are hooked to fishing lines and for some reason lost to time, pickles: both inflatable and edible. It makes little sense, but it keeps cross weird. SFCX was easily doing 500 entries until the pandemic and racer registrations this year pushed past 300 sign-ups while the day-long event draws in another few hundred onlookers. Did Valenti expect such a positive reaction during those early years? An immediate laugh and rhetorical “No!”
Asked about the most difficult part, he said the three months of logistics with the brewery, sponsors and suppliers then a final four-weekend stretch of true course prep, yard rakes and heavy-duty worksite equipment alike, to pull it all off for one day of racing. “It’s $250 in course tape I could have gotten donated,” he said gesturing to the meandering main spectator field where the trademark Rastafarian red, yellow and green tell us where to turn. But we all pay to play and presentation matters. So what’s the best part? “Tonight at like six o’clock, I’ll walk around and that’s my favorite part. Closing the course with a few tight people and knowing that we got through it. I am sick to my stomach up until that very moment.”
‘Closing the course with a few tight people and knowing that we got through it.’
Dropping the Hammer
The SFCX course is what an exhilarating layout should be. Fifth Street Cross, covered here, is a fast and authentic steeple chase. The 2024 Crossasaurus Awesome berm-to-whoops-to-tabletop triple threat was my idea of off-road racing. Sly Fox is simply epic from the first turn to the screaming downhill drop-the-hammer drag race to the finish.
In-between, you’ll eat clouds of dirt through tight single-track, navigate a loose gravel section that rewarded those who rolled the dice and, in most years but not this one, slog through and fling off pounds of mud while pushing through a punishing field of pine trees. Maybe roadies compare some part of their circuits to Laguna Seca’s Corkscrew. I frankly don’t know. What I do know is that Sly Fox’s horsepower hill, where the Clydesdales and Weight Weenies collide, is where the tattered veil of societal norms is finally cast to the wind.
Every CX course should have “that” feature and the Fox Hole, an aptly-named pit of chaos and camaraderie, is it. It’s not fun to run and promoters somehow managed to make it even more difficult this year by putting another hill on top of their signature mountain. You hear it coming, a rowdy and menacing drone, before you actually see it and it flings you out of the frying pan and into the fire. With teeth clenched and legs burning no matter how you clamber to the peak, it’s lined with a hundred loosened-up fans verbally propelling you to the top and reminding me that I paid $50 to dry heave on lap two.
At times, it feels like the Fox Hole descends straight through the earth and smack into the center of Belgium before ascending skyward again. Think of it as an affordable weekend get-away in Europe. The Citadel of Namur, Belgium needs little introduction to seasoned cross racers. The classic event, almost always a freezing mess of late-season off-camber muck against a century-old stone fortification along the Meuse river, is a great introduction to newcomers. That said, a quick history lesson and entirely relevant detour given the setting and hand-up history.
‘By far, Sly Fox has the best energy out of the entire local race scene.’
Before the UCI hosted its first cross event at Namur in 2009, this very same spot of land was a European Grand Prix motocross course for half-a-century and hosted equally epic open class races. The earth-churning, ground-pounding 500cc dirt bikes of yesteryear powered up Namur’s massive climbs, leapt over culverts and weaved between trees that could take you out for the count in a split-second. One pearl-clutching moment in particular will resonate with cyclocross fans while leaving modern sport aficionados’ mouths agape. Namur’s crowds were truly massive and one pub in particular kept them well-hydrated. In 1988, Swede privateer Hakan Cavrlqvist, tired of how serious this similarly niche sport had become, arranged a secret deal with his brother where he’d stop on-course to chug a beer granted a safe-enough lead to do so. Guess what? He demolished the field and went into the history books that day; the 56-second mark here immortalizes the moment.
In cyclocross, it’s called a “hand-up” and is not technically a crime, but only goes on in clandestine corners of the course. It’s a little different at Fox Hole. Mixed into the onlookers perched on their heels and haunches while clinging to the snow fencing for dear life was a bit of mountain bike heckling – as is cathartic tradition. “They can rail turns, absorb all the bumps and have easier gearing. The spirit of cross? You’re ‘under-biking,’” as one heckler explained it to me.
So I took that information back to Chris Errico from Ocean County, New Jersey whom I parked next to and struck up a conversation with. He’d mainly raced hours-long endurance MTB events before finally deciding (like we all do) that cross looked like a lot more fun. “Coming from a mountain bike background, I could ride some of the more technical sections and the line choices helped me out. It was just the right amount of sketch,” he said. Still all smiles after his first-ever cross race at 8 a.m. and willingly doing it all over again at 11, an unprovoked conclusion was reached aboard the steel-is-real lugged frame with SRAM shifters perched to the drops and rolling on 33-millimeter tires just to stay in the UCI’s good graces: “To me, drop bar riding is under-biking.” For some reason, that concept of a rigid and twitchy contraption, vastly outgunned on unforgiving ground, has fanatical appeal. Spin to win.
A Foreign Field
“By far, Sly Fox has the best energy out of the entire local race scene,” Jovian Yoh, Cooper River Cyclocross promoter and owner of the Marlton, New Jersey-based Aistriu sports shop, said between his second and third races of the day. “Since racing Sly Fox and starting to promote Cooper, my goal is to capture that same energy.”
Out here in the wilderness, wildness and wonderful weirdness of Pottstown, this massive production unfolding like clockwork at 11 a.m. on a Sunday is as close to European racing some of us will ever get… and it’s a damn fine consolation present.
To appropriate poet Rupert Brooke’s stance on sacrifice and heritage, here’s one corner of a domestic field that’s forever Belgium. Within Pottstown’s rich topsoil, a richer dust yet is spread and strewn with spit, sweat, spilled lager and, of course, pickle brine. Light the match and burn that birthday candle from both ends because this last waltz at Sly Fox was, and as it should always be, a party on wheels.
Greg Adomaitis 