Mud, Rain and Good Company — A Day at the Munster Cyclecross Championship
I'll be honest, cyclecross was not on my radar as something I'd ever photograph. I do photograph a few running events alright, but I had never photographed a cyclocross race. I do not, as a rule, hang around muddy racecourses in Limerick in December.
My friend is one of the organisers of the Munster Cyclocross Championship final at Patrickswell Racecourse. He also races, which tells you everything about the kind of person cyclecross attracts. People who spend their weekends voluntarily cycling through bogs in horizontal rain and call it a good time.
It was raining when I arrived. It rained all day. My Nikon Z8 and Z9 got absolutely soaked. Neither complained as much about the rain as I did. If you've ever wondered whether Nikon's weather sealing holds up in genuinely horrible conditions, I can confirm: it does.
The first challenge was the track. The course at Patrickswell is pretty long, and planting myself in one spot wasn't going to work. I needed a system, find the best locations, learn the lap timing, move efficiently. Once I found my rhythm, I started to actually see what was happening around me.
What I hadn't expected was the atmosphere. I know it sounds like a cliché, but the cyclecross community felt like one big family. Some of my favourite shots aren't even the action frames. It's the quieter moments, two riders facing each other in the fading light, a lone rider cresting a hill beneath a bare winter tree.
A note on the black and white images , I edited a selection of the shots in black and white. I'm drawn to black and white images in general as a photographer. In cyclecross especially, the riders' kits can be incredibly colourful, bright reds, yellows, bright blues. Black and white strips all of that away and shifts the focus to what I find most interesting, the faces of the cyclists.
Would I shoot cyclocross again? Absolutely. It pushed me to work faster, think differently, and stay present.
There's something freeing about shooting in conditions where you are not looking for perfection, when you can just shoot and go with the flow. Shooting something you don’t shoot every day is also a great exercise, I can’t wait for the new season to begin…but maybe a race without the rain would be good:)
If you're organising a sporting event and looking for coverage, I'd love to hear from you — info@doorusphoto.net
