The State of Australian CX Part 5: Queensland
Australia’s northernmost cyclocross racing all takes place in Queensland, and while the local heat and humidity isn’t something you’ll find in the sport’s homeland of Belgium, here’s how the folks in the Sunshine State get their cyclocross on.
There were two main organisers of cyclocross races in Queensland in 2019 - the South East Queensland Cyclocross Series (hereafter abbreviated to SE QLD CX Series) who run races in the Brisbane area, and Cairns Cycling Club, who ran one CX race a month at their home velodrome for club members and interested locals in the far north. For the most part, this analysis will focus on the SE QLD CX Series.
The mascot of the South East Queensland Cyclocross Series, the mighty Koala of Flanders.
Photo: @queenslandcyclocross
Methodology
Where ages of participants are referred to, these will refer to racing ages (effectively one year older than most people are IRL). The participation figures are for each individual race day, so a person who entered every round would account for 10 people in the figure below. While this may skew results slightly in favour of those who turn up most regularly, we feel it’s most representative of what the sport as a whole looks like from race day to race day.
Things we’ve included in this dataset:
Race results from the 2019 South East Queensland CX Series, including results by age and gender;
Race results from the 2019 Queensland CX State Championships, including results by age and gender; and
People who started races, but did not finish, and are marked as DNF on the results sheet.
Things we’ve not included in this dataset:
Data from the 12 club races that were not part of the official SE QLD CX Series;
Data from the 2 rounds of the MTBA CX National Series that were held in Queensland (you can read about those here);
People who entered races, but didn’t start, and are marked as DNS on the results sheet.
Data for kids races where participants are 10 and under, because:
Most kids races don’t give their smallest racers timing chips (meaning they won’t show up in officially timed results);
We believe that the priority for young kids is to get them enjoying bikes, and we want to encourage race organisers to promote having fun over racing; and
We want to respect the privacy of the kids and their loved ones.
There’s a reason they call him ‘The Postman’ - Beej Albany sends it over the barriers in R3 of the SE QLD CX Series.
Photo: @b.rad_wheels
The 2019 South East Queensland CX Series
The 2019 SE QLD CX Series was made up of three state series rounds and the State Championships, all hosted within an hour of Brisbane’s CBD. The warmer weather in Queensland meant there’s little chance of seeing any winter jackets in our photos - short sleeves all the way!
Round One: Nundah Velodrome, May 26th
Round Two: Underwood Park, June 16th
Queensland State CX Championships: Ipswich, July 7th
Round Three: Portuguese Club, September 1st
Jaye Buswell whips herself and her bike around a tree on her way to capturing the Elite Women’s state championship.
Photo: @b.rad_wheels
Facts and figures
Number of 2019 CX series races (including State Championships): 4 (Southeastern Queensland Series races x 3, Queensland State CX Championships)
Number of other 2019 CX races: 14 (Cairns Cycling Club x 11, 2 x CX National Series rounds, 1 x club race for Brisbane Cycling Festival)
Organising club/s (series races):
First race: May 26th
Last race: September 1st
Total number of race entrants: 429 (3rd)
Biggest race day: 115 (T-3rd)
Average participants per race day: 107.3 (3rd)
Percentage of male participants: 76.2% (2rd)
Percentage of female participants: 23.8% (5th)
Racers graded by: Ability (A/B/C Grade)
Claims to fame:
Longest possible drive between race days (Brisbane -> Cairns)
Most non-series club races
Least ‘cyclocross’ cyclocross weather
Scott Smith of Kent Factory racing lines it out through the trees in R1 of the SE QLD CX Series at the Nundah Criterium Track.
Photo: @b.rad_wheels
CX Racing in Queensland
The four race days in the SE QLD CX Series had a total of 424 participants, with an average of 106 attendees at each race day (as with the rest of our State of Australian CX Series articles, this figure does not include children under the age of 10, who normally get to race as well).
The data from Queensland continued to show a commonality between the CX National Series and the NSW/ACT CX Series in one aspect - when there’s a championship on the line, racers show up in bigger numbers. Aside from the two rounds of the CX National Series hosted in Queensland (which featured a large number of riders flying in from interstate to participate), the second-best attended cyclocross race in Queensland in 2019 was the State Championships - even though it was the furthest of all four race days from Brisbane!
What’s notable looking at the graph below is the remarkably consistent attendance across all four race days in 2019, with a difference of just 24 participants between the days with the highest and lowest attendance.
Participation in 2019 SEQLD CX Series, by race day
Cate Blackburn scales the run up at the Queensland Portuguese Club in R3 of the 2019 SE QLD CX Series.
Photo: @b.rad_wheels
Grading in the SE QLD CX Series
The SE QLD CX Series is graded by ability for adults, with adult riders separated into A, B and C grades based on their riding prowess. Junior riders are separated by age in two-year increments (Under 13, Under 15 and Under 17), but normally ride on the course at the same time as the C Graders for their gender.
Interestingly, these grades were maintained throughout the entirety of the 2019 SE QLD CX Series, including the State Championships. This is in sharp contrast to other Australian states such as Victoria and NSW/ACT, which switch from ability-based grading to age-based grading for their State Championships. The result is that Queensland didn’t crown a state champion for, say, riders aged between 40-45, but they did crown a Men’s C Grade state champion - which seems somewhat counterintuitive, even if it’s probably a good indicator of who needs to move up a grade!
As with most other CX series around Australia, B grade proved to be the most popular grade for male riders, making up 42.5% of the total adult men who raced cyclocross in the SE QLD CX Series last year, compared with 22.1% for A grade and 35.4% for C grade.
Men's participation in 2019 SE QLD CX Series, by race day
As for the women’s racing in Queensland, the most popular grade was C grade, which has also proved to be the most popular grade for women in most of the Australian states we’ve covered in this series. Over the course of the 2019 SE QLD CX Series 53.8% of adult female participants took part in C grade racing, compared with 27.5% for women’s A grade and 18.7% for women’s B grade.
This level of women’s participation is the result of some very hard behind-the-scenes work of some dedicated folks at Queensland Cyclocross, which is worth discussing in a bit more detail.
Women's participation in 2019 SE QLD CX Series, by race day
Members of the women’s B grade and C grade fields come together for a photo opportunity after R2 of the 2019 SE QLD CX Series at Underwood Park.
Photo: @qldcxcollective
Gender and the 2019 SE QLD CX Series
Of the 424 participants in the 2019 SE QLD CX Series, 93 were women and girls - just shy of 22%. That participation level remained more or less even across the four race days in 2019, ranging from a low of 18.3% at the State Championships to a high of 25.8% at the third and final round of the regular series at the Queensland Portuguese Club.
Participation in 2019 SE QLD CX Series, by gender
Participation in 2019 SE QLD CX Series, by race day and gender
While this places Queensland 5th among Australia’s state series for women’s participation, this figure is a significant improvement from previous years of cyclocross action in the Sunshine State. After a recent conversation with Queensland Cyclocross head honcho Andrew Viles, he was kind enough to send through Queensland Cyclocross’ participation statistics dating back to the 2016 state championships.
At that State Championship race in 2016, women made up 14 of the 72 adult participants - or 19.4% of the overall number of adult racers. While that was an encouraging starting point for growing women’s participation in cyclocross, the fact that it’s the only CX event in 2016 we were able to get participation data for does limit the usefulness of that information somewhat.
Since 2016, the total number of women participating in cyclocross in Queensland has increased with each subsequent year, which can be seen in the red columns in the left hand graph below.
2016 - 14 female participants at 1 race.
2017 - 32 female participants across 4 races.
2018 - 89 female participants across 6 races.
2019 - 91 female participants across 4 races.
Women's participation in the SE QLD CX Series, by year (2016-2019)
Growth in women's participation in SE QLD CX Series, by year (2016-2019)
Though the total number of women participating in the SE QLD CX Series has been increasing since 2016, it was notable that in 2017 and 2018 the percentage of women racing compared to men actually went down - an indication that while women’s cyclocross was growing in popularity, it wasn’t doing so quite as fast as their male counterparts.
What was improving was the consistency with which female racers were taking to the start line - while in 2017 the average female racer completed 1.8 races across the season, by 2018 that had jumped up to 2.3 starts per racer, and it remained at that average of 2.3 starts per female racer in 2019.
Though the average female racer started the same number of racers as in 2018, in 2019 there were 47 unique women who pinned on a number.
So what’s been the cause of this growth in women’s participation in Queensland? In short, it’s been the result of a lot of hard work.
Queensland CX Collective held trail rides throughout 2019 and the pre-COVID part of 2020 to help women, trans and femme riders feel more confident on the bike and establish a supportive riding community.
Photo: @qldcxcollective
Over the past few years, members of the Queensland Cyclocross organising committee have taken turns in their efforts to promote women’s participation in CX, but things really began to take off after Cate Blackburn visited the 2018 Melbourne Grand Prix of CX, and found herself particularly inspired by the women’s forum that was held on the night before racing commenced.
Upon her return to Queensland, Cate started up the Queensland Cyclocross Collective in conjunction with Jaye Buswell - herself an elite rider and trans woman - as (in Cate’s words) ‘a space to support and showcase female and gender diverse riders’.
Since the formation of the QLD CX Collective, they’ve hosted weekly rides open to all women, trans and femme riders and sought to build a community of support for women and gender diverse riders in Queensland, as well as encouraging them to participate in racing for the first time. As the statistics above show (especially for 2019), their efforts have been paying off handsomely - a testament to what can be achieved through community building and good old-fashioned hard work.
Although there’s still some way to go in making the sport of cyclocross in Queensland (and Australia more generally) more gender-diverse, the progress that’s been made in the last few years shows that it can be done.
It’s great to see that the commitment to promoting women’s trans and femme riders extends to course design, as Queensland Cyclocross organisers included a WTF symbol in the course for R1 of the 2019 SE QLD CX Series at Nundah Crit Track.
Photo: @queenslandcyclocross