One of my all-time fave races. I love the sand chaos of Koksijde and I love the intense racing period over this time of year. And I also love deeply Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado slowly coming back to her best after a very long illness and injury. With all the young ones coming up, she does not get enough love. UCI World Champion, European U23 Champion, Netherlands Champion, 1st in DVV Trophy and Superprestige, and 2nd in UCI World Cup, all in the same year and all when she was twenty-one.
I’ve been waiting a long time for Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado to ride like she did in 2019 / 20. The pandemic and all the shit it intensified wasn’t good for her. And this season, she’s been riding like I remember, the one who won the World Championships. It’s more than a week since that first win, and she did it again at Superprestige Merksplas, leaving everyone in the mud behind her. Still and always my favourite rider.
I went to see the Gemäldegalerie’s Spätgotik exhibition yesterday. First time going to an exhib in over a year, first time voluntarily inside a venue with other people in a over a year, first blah etc. First hanging out with someone new in physical space in a heap of time also.
And it’s medieval art and we were checking out Master of the Housebook’s Last Supper and I was all “Northern Germanic Gothic is the shit.” And she was all “lol blowjob.”
Pretty sure that’s not what Staatliche Museen zu Berlin gave me a press pass to come up with.
Gala opening for Dries Van Noten at Paris Fashion Week. My Gala. That Dries. Antwerp Six Dries. I’m very in love with all this. I want to steal all the clothes and shoes.
Feels a bit weird to be celebrating something as superficially frivolous as new cycling kit at the moment. But it’s not.
Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado has been my favourite rider for what feels like years now, even though it’s probably only early-2018 I first saw her race, or maybe late-2017, and her winning the cyclocross World Championships at the start of February feels like years ago as well. I’ve been needing new kit for a while now (and a new bike, and an old bike rebuild), and been holding off ’cos kit is mad expensive and none of what I saw really grabbed me, both aesthetically as well as in terms of what it means.
I have no idea how she might see someone like me, what her position is on trans femmes and trans women competing in the women’s section. And I have no idea what her position is on Black Lives Matter, or even if she has the space and support to have an unambiguously public one. But I do know young Black and Brown girls and women see her lining up first row of the start line every week, see her race and win (back when those things actually happened) in the Rainbow jersey, and see themselves, see possibilities for themselves and people like them. That shit matters.
I was ? Shut Up And Take My Money! the instant I saw her kit and everyone I’ve shown it to is ?.
It’s been about 2 years since I last got my arse into a studio and did a ballet class. Good reasons for finding other physicalities to entertain myself since then, going deep in cyclocross and riding, enjoying cold and wet and windy work outside. But I missed ballet. I missed the good things of being in a studio doing the work, I missed being there with good teachers and brilliant pianists.
And this week, I’m back working with Isabelle Schad (remotely, of course), and needed something to get me going, something quick and snappy with a variety of intensities and velocities, something to put me in where I needed to be for the work. And I found Het National Ballet are live-streaming a ballet barre. And first day of doing it was wow have I come far from all that, like a memory of being a dancer but watching myself in the mirror (of course I did, it’s ballet training) I was laughing at how I have all these muscles that are very not from dance, and how much and how my body has changed in the last two years. On the third day though, I started to see it all again, physicality waking up and unburying, and yeah, enjoying it so much.
Ernst Meisner is such a cheerful teacher and Rex Lobo is a joy of a pianist. And doing it live, knowing they’re both in the studio as I’m here in my apartment, and there’s hundreds or thousands of other dancers whereever and we’re all doing it together, it’s truly beautiful and reminds me of how dance saved me over and over (and how dance is also a hard bitch, but, yeah, let’s just enjoy the good stuff for one day, eh), and how special dance is, how fundamental moving together is for life.
So very ?
Fuck yes.
Ever since I saw Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado racing a couple of years ago, not even 20 years old and smashing it in the Under-23 and Elite levels (’cos of course women’s cyclocross is only now beginning to approach parity with the menz) she became my Number 1 fave. Yes, I am a fan. Her 2018-19 season was what gets called a breakthrough, but this season ?. Currently she’s 1st in the DVV Trofee, 1st in Superprestige, was so close to winning the UCI World Cup until that last off-camber at Hoogerheide, ending 2nd there, 1st also in UCI Under-23 World Cup, Netherlands National Championships, UEC European Under-23 Championships, plus enough 1st’s and podiums in so many races she could retire now, at age 21, and still be one of the all-time greats.
And today, having decided a couple of weeks ago to race in the Elite UCI World Championships and not the Under-23s, on an utter slog of a course, where her mad technical skills were going to once again come up against Annemarie Worst’s sprint, in a race which came to those two in a sprint, she utterly fucking smashed it.
World Champion right there.
I did not expect her to win the rainbow bands this year. On a muddy, sandy, cold, technical, up and down course like Namur, against Annemarie Worst or Lucinda Brandt, yes, but this flat grind which would always favour sprinters, I thought she’d need another off-season to work out how to do that. Maybe it was Hoogerheide, which she was going to win until that slide out of the muddy rut blew it all apart, the first time all season she’d had such a catastrophic wipeout. This was her comeback race and for those three riders, it was a truly brutal one from start to finish.
And yes, it’s so important she’s Dominican-Dutch, one of the only brown riders in a sport that’s so white — historically cyclocross is a sport for weird Belgian and Dutch farmers in winter, but even in the UK, US, Canada, and elsewhere where’s it’s become huge, it’s dead slack on diversity — and the only one at that level who’s getting any regular attention. Plus I will always rate big curly hair.
Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado 🌈🥇🇳🇱🇩🇴 2020 UCI Cyclocross Women’s Elite World Champion.
My fave cyclocross rider for the last couple of years, probably my fave rider full stop, Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado. And one of my favourite races, the very sandy, very hilly, very intense Koksijde. I was screaming when she opened the gap in the last sand section towards the end of the last lap, after five laps of head-to-head with a quartet of the best, screaming even louder when Lucinda Brand cooked the last hairpin (though I wish she hadn’t). Mad good racing and loving Ceylin taking her first World Cup elite victory, especially at Koksijde.
Last of my favourite races until the cyclocross starts again. Giro Rosa, 10 days of riding in northern Italy, and Our Girls smashed it. Annamiek van Vleuten winning the GC, points, and mountains classifications as well as 2 stages; Amanda Spratt 3rd overall, Lucy Kennedy almost winning stage 3, and Mitchelton-SCOTT all-round the most enjoyable team to watch. Elsewhere Marianne Vos utterly shredding it with 4 stage wins and showing mad cyclocross skills, Kasia Niewiadoma almost on the podium at the end (and team with best-looking bikes), Anna van der Breggen, Elisa Longo Borghini and others just showing brilliant riding. More of this, please and thanks.
