The Cyclocross World Championships are coming back across the Atlantic.
On Friday, the UCI announced that CX Worlds 2022 will be held in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in January of that year. It will be just the second time the event has come to the U.S.—after the 2013 races in Louisville, Kentucky—as well as its second-ever appearance outside Europe.
It’s not a surprise that Northwest Arkansas managed to woo Worlds back to the States. The region has been pushing hard to become a world-renowned cycling destination, and it has some serious financial backing. Bentonville, which neighbors Fayetteville, is home to Walmart’s corporate headquarters, and cycling is a cornerstone of the Walton family’s efforts to attract a young, educated workforce to the area.
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In the last 10 years, the Walton Family Foundation has given more than $70 million to support bike trails in Northwest Arkansas, helping lead to the construction of nearly 400 miles of trails (including extensive singletrack networks) and paved paths in the area. Hosting Worlds, and other high-profile races, is another part of that plan.
Worlds 2022 will go down on Millsaps Mountain, a 228-acre property purchased last February with a 50-50 matching grant by the Walton Family Foundation. Located near the University of Arkansas flagship campus, Millsaps is envisioned as a cycling-centric park with a 6-mile mountain bike race course, a 1-mile practice and skills loop, and a large spectator area.
According to VeloNews, inspiration for the park came from Valmont Bike Park in Boulder, Colorado, which has hosted the Cyclocross Nationals and UCI ’cross races, but also maintains trails with skills loops, jump lines, and pump tracks for the community’s everyday use.
Advocacy group BikeNWA is heading up the organization efforts and has recruited Brook Watts—who put on CrossVegas, the first UCI World Cup event in the U.S.—as race director and course designer. Watts said that BikeNWA plans to host “elite international races” in the region starting this year.
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Brendan Quirk, a member of the group’s board of directors, told VeloNews that this will likely include a UCI C2 cyclocross race in 2019, as well as “something bigger” in 2020. Quirk also said that eventually, the region hopes to attract World Cup XC mountain bike and cyclocross races, and will gun for a national championship event.
As with the first U.S.-hosted Worlds, spectators can likely look forward to a larger American field in 2022. In fact, it could reinvigorate the discipline nationally by bringing exposure to a new region. Northwest Arkansas only held its first major ’cross race series last year, but BikeNWA has said that it plans on growing a local CX scene in the next few years to support the big event.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Northwest Arkansas held its first cyclocross race last year. The region held individual CX races before that, but last year BikeNWA aggregated some local races into a new series.
