America’s Best Take on Uncharted Territory in West Virginia
America’s Best Take on Uncharted Territory in West Virginia
A USA National Road Championship Preview
This year’s USA Pro Nationals will be an entirely new battleground for America’s best road racers. The event ends its decade-plus run in Knoxville, Tennessee for 2024, moving to the relentless hills and descents of Charleston, West Virginia. The climbs will hit harder this year, the competition more open and the John Denver lyrics will be quoted ad nauseam. There is plenty to get excited about.
The new course eschews the more explosive parcours that Knoxville provided in favor of a set of longer climbs looping up and back to the start/finish on the Kanawha River (pronounced kuh-NAW by the locals) in downtown Charleston. There was actually slightly more elevation per mile in Knoxville but it was broken into many smaller ramps. This year’s route boasts over eleven thousand feet of vertical elevation gain condensed into two extended climbs each lap, each repeated ten times for the men and six for the women.
Imagine doing twenty extended Vo2 intervals with about eight minutes of recovery between each. That is what the men’s field will take on this weekend, in humid conditions approaching ninety degrees. The distances will be considerably longer this year as well with the men’s field adding around 25 km, for a total of 212 km, and the women adding 16 km, for a total of 127 km. With the prolonged climbs and seemingly technical descents, this could actually mean up to an hour of extra race time over the previous editions in Knoxville. As Dave Towle often proclaims on start lines across the country: “only the strong will survive.”
The Women: An Elite Selection
For a new, unknown course like this one, I find it helpful to try to look at similar races on the calendar to guide analysis. For the women especially, I think the best comparison is the iconic Sunset Loop, the final stage of the Redlands Bicycle Classic. The races start in a similar way, a brief flat roll out before heading immediately into a punishing climb. Like Redlands, the climbing on the Charleston course begins with a steep ramp where field separation is likely and then rolls onto lesser gradients towards the summit. In this year’s Redlands, that type of opening climb led to five separate groups on the road in the first ten miles of the race, and a lead group of less than fifteen riders who would contest for the win.
Although the competition level is higher at Nationals, there are far fewer teammates to rely on to clawback gaps for most and I would expect a similar, do-or-die type effort on the first lap. It will very likely be an elite selection early in the race. The question is who will make it?
The World Tour riders are among the first names to jump off the start list. EF Education First Cannondale brings four riders, with last year’s second place finisher Coryn Labecki and Kristin Faulkner, who is fresh off of a stage win at the Vuelta, as headline names. Human Powered Health adds a shallow but high-powered roster with Lily Williams and 2019 champion Ruth Edwards. All of those riders will have an impact on the race. If I had to pick one as a protagonist for the race finale it would be Faulkner who showed excellent form on the hills of Spain already this month.
There is certainly no guarantee that the Stars and Stripes jersey will go to a World Tour rider though. The Continental Pro teams have plenty of firepower too. Cynisca and Virginia’s Blue Ridge Twenty24 have Lauren Stephens and Emma Langley respectively to lead their efforts with multiple teammates for support. Both are former champions, Stephens in 2021 and Langley in 2022. North American Powerhouse DNA Pro Cycling appears to have the biggest team in the race with five riders led by rising star Maeghan Easler. Finally, Fount Cycling Guild bring the American two thirds of their usual climbing trio with Alia Shafi and Elizabeth Dixon. Dixon and Shafi have combined with Belgian Eleanor Wiseman to produce stunning results this year for the amateur squad including a win on the hardest stage in American racing, the Gila Monster.
In my view, anything could happen after the early selection is made and the race enters its decisive phases. Stephens and Faulkner may be the strongest all around riders on paper with impressive climbing and solo riding performances recently. However, many of the riders mentioned above could easily use that as an excuse to not pull the six miles of flat each lap and make the big favorites work themselves out of the race. National Championship races, with their unique fields, often break from usual tactics and narratives entirely. The rider who best masters that chaos will come out on top.
Predictions:
Stephens
Faulkner
Dixon
The Men: A New Paradigm
On the men’s side the biggest change in dynamic will likely come from the dissolution of the Human Powered Health men’s team at the end of 2023. In past years, HPH could use their high powered, largely American roster to full effect to stack the odds against every other team in the race. The EF Education teams usually had a similar impact with their slew of American World Tour riders but this year they have only two riders on the start list. In 2024, the Project Echelon team will be looking to assume the dominant team position in the race. But that role isn’t something you inherit, it has to be taken by force on the road. On such a demanding course, that is far from a given.
The men’s race will open with the same steep climb up Bridge Road minutes after the start. If I was a World Tour rider and worried about Echelon using their ten riders against me, I might consider driving the pace up the first climb in an attempt to thin those numbers out immediately. With a larger field, higher speeds for drafting and larger teams, the selection likely won’t be as drastic in the men’s race though. The battle will inevitably resume up the steadier gradients of the Wertz-Oak Ridge climb on the other side of the river where I could see an early break forming more easily. With 212 km to cover, the biggest fireworks could come later on the men’s side but count on steady attrition lap after lap.
Project Echelon showed they can manage climbs at an elite level by protecting their GC lead with big numbers in the group on the Sunset Loop and the Gila Monster stage earlier this season. Tyler Stites, is the obvious leader of the Echelon offensive but he has better backup than ever before as he aims to take one more step up the podium after scoring third in 2023 and second in 2022. Riders like Rhim, McGill, Boardman and now Stephen Bassett will be impactful additions while team veterans Arnopol and Scala Jr. have also made big time contributions, with Scala Jr. especially playing an instrumental role in 2022’s race. Those riders aren’t likely to be dropped early, even under World Tour pressure and can be used to attack and tilt the race in Echelon’s favor. Stites proved he can contend with the world’s best in the team’s early season European campaign and this time he should have more help along the way.
Some of America’s biggest cycling superstars will have other ideas however. Brandon McNulty will be preparing for another Tour de France alongside Tadej Pogacar and will surely bring some stunning form on the climbs. EF’s Neilson Powless is one of the world’s best one-day riders and even after a quiet start to the 2024 season, he cannot be ignored on a race course approaching the length and difficulty of the European Classics he has performed so well in. His former teammate Lawson Craddock, now of Bike Exchange-Jayco, would only be flying across the pond to race Nationals if he thought he could win as well.
These three are a level above the rest in terms of proven capacity but they only have one teammate between them in EF’s Sean Quinn. Even if they work together as World Tour riders sometimes do at Nationals, it will be four against Echelon’s ten. They are all capable of producing spectacular rides when it comes to big races and they will need to do that if they want to don the Stars and Stripes at this year’s Tour.
Of course, there is a lot more talent in the field beyond Echelon and the World Tour riders. Teams like Aevolo and Team California have been players in the big American races so far this year and I would expect that to continue here. Past Nationals protagonists like Robin Carpenter, Tyler Williams and 2022 Champion Kyle Murphy join the peloton as well but their form remains a question so far this season.
I certainly wouldn’t bet the farm on my own predictions for a race like this. Anything could happen out there. If I had to though, I would wager Echelon will successfully get riders up the road early despite the best efforts of the other contenders. The World Tour guys will have to work and attack to get across and Stites should be strong enough to mark those efforts. As long as Echelon has numbers or the best rider in any early attack and Stites doesn’t falter in the key moments behind, they should have all the best cards in the finale. They may overplay their hand or get caught bluffing, but if they play it right there is no reason Echelon can’t take their place on the throne of American bike racing on Sunday Afternoon. The underdog Smartstop team led a similar coup against the World Tour riders a decade ago to take the victory in 2014. It could be time for history to repeat itself.
Predictions:
Stites
Powless
Bassett
All photos by Snowy Mountain Photography
Tess Edwards races for Cynsica. Ruth (Winder) Edwards races for HPH.
Wiseman is Belgian, thus not eligible to race US road nats and/or be a podium contender.