Cyclocross Pre-Season Underway!

The cyclocross season is already four races old, and most of the sport has not seen a lap of it. The USCX 2026 standings have leaders: Tofik Beshir among the elite men and Manon Bakker among the elite women, both on 172 points after four of six rounds. All four of its races so far have been in the eastern United States, at Rochester and Roanoke. The Belgian and Dutch calendar, where the television cameras live, does not start until Dendermonde on 11 October. By then the American series will already be decided.

So this is the score before most viewers tune in. It covers elite men and elite women only. It starts with the four results that exist, moves to the two series titles that could be settled in Baltimore this weekend, and ends with what Europe is still waiting to learn. Start with the one number that frames it.

USCX 2026 standings: four races, two weekends, two leaders

The US Cyclocross Series has shrunk. It ran four weekends last winter. This year it is three weekends on consecutive dates, each with a C1 race on Saturday and a C2 race on Sunday. Rochester, New York opened it on 19 and 20 September. Virginia’s Blue Ridge GO Cross in Roanoke followed on 26 and 27 September. Charm City Cross in Baltimore closes it on 3 and 4 October. Six races, and four are done.

The points scale explains why the two days are not equal. A C1 win is worth 50 points in the series table and a C2 win is worth 40. Second place is 42 on Saturday and 32 on Sunday. That makes the Saturday race the one that moves the table. A win on Sunday is worth less than second place on Saturday. Keep the 50 and the 40 in mind. The final weekend is worth 90 points to anyone who wins both races, and every calculation later in this piece comes back to that number.

Here is what the four races produced.

Read the board from left to right and two patterns jump out. The men’s races have one name that keeps coming back: Beshir was second, then first three times. The women’s races have one name that won three times and was beaten once, by six seconds, after a crash in the last corner. Everybody else has been fighting for the places behind them.

Clark and Conaway are level on 126 points; the official table lists them joint second. CFP prints Clark first because the series site does.

Tofik Beshir has turned the men’s series into a chase

The man in front is 19 years old and Ethiopian, and he races for the American development team CXD Trek Bikes. Before this month he had a long list of good junior and under-23 results and no USCX win. He now has three. Beshir took his first elite series win on the second day in Rochester, attacking on the third of nine laps. He told Cyclingnews: “I knew, if I wanted to win today, I had to go early.” He held off his own team-mate, Miles Mattern, by 24 seconds.

Roanoke is where he took control. The course has a long sand pit, a lot of climbing and little technical terrain. That is a course for strength, not skill. On Saturday he let the others attack first. “Once everyone did their attacks and got tired, I hammered it,” he said, and he won by 42 seconds over Clark. On Sunday it was dry and dusty, and he waited until three laps to go before going clear. He won by 22 seconds over Ethan Brown. “I saw they were tired because they kept breaking late,” he said. That is a rider reading a race, not just riding it.

The table behind him is crowded. Clark, the Canadian from Caledon Hills Armada, has been in the top five in all four races without winning one. Conaway of Midwest NXT has done the same. They are tied on 126. Ethan Brown, Conaway’s Midwest NXT team-mate, is fourth on 114 after his second place on Sunday. Dylan Zakrajsek of Competitive Edge Racing is fifth on 98, one point ahead of Ben Frederick.

Two names are missing from the top of that list. Miles Mattern won the series opener in Rochester, his home town, and was second on the Sunday. He then did not score in Roanoke and has dropped to ninth on 82 points. No reason has been reported. Andrew Strohmeyer, the reigning Pan-American champion, did not finish the first race and has 22 points after four rounds. For the two riders who looked like the obvious threats on paper, the series has gone badly.

What does a 46-point lead mean with two races left? Almost everything. A rider can score at most 90 points this weekend, by winning both races. Clark and Conaway can therefore reach 216 points at most. Beshir already has 172. He needs 45 more to put the title out of reach, and he gets them with a win on Saturday alone, or with a second place on Saturday plus a handful of points on Sunday.

The honest summary: Beshir can only lose this series by having a bad weekend at the same time as Clark or Conaway has a perfect one. He has not had a bad race yet. Would you bet on his first one coming this Saturday?

Manon Bakker won three straight, then crashed in the last corner

The women’s series has a clearer favourite and a closer race. Manon Bakker is a Dutch rider who normally races the World Cup in Europe. She came to Rochester for her first race after iliac artery surgery. “I was pretty nervous beforehand because of my surgery,” she said after the opener. “But after lap one, I was, like, ‘I got this.’” She broke away on the second lap and won by 46 seconds over Sidney McGill.

She won again on the Sunday, by 30 seconds, and again on Saturday in Roanoke, by 38 seconds over Kaya Musgrave. On a hilly, sandy course with few technical sections, she described the race as closer to a road race: full effort all the time. “I was suffering,” she said. She still won. That made it three wins from three races.

The fourth race is the one that makes this series interesting. On Sunday in Roanoke, in dry and dusty conditions, McGill stayed with Bakker into the last lap. Bakker tried to make McGill lead. McGill would not. “She would just like sit up and try and get me to go on the front,” McGill said. “I was like, ‘I’ve learned my lesson from you.’” Bakker attacked on the final climb and crashed in the last corner before the descent. McGill won by six seconds. Bakker did not hide how she felt: “I don’t like losing. Winning is the only thing.”

McGill, the Canadian who rides for the Belgian team Materiaal-Lastig, has been on the podium in three of the four races. She was second twice in Rochester and fourth on Saturday in Roanoke before her win. That consistency is why she is the only realistic challenger.

Behind the top two, the race for third is close. Kaya Musgrave of Competitive Edge Racing has 125 points and Lauren Zoerner of Corner Racing has 120. Aleah Heiland of CXD Trek Bikes is fifth on 90. Nico Knoll and Ada Watson missed Rochester and still sit ninth and tenth, which tells you how much two good days in Roanoke were worth.

Bakker’s lead is 24 points. That is smaller than it looks. If McGill wins on Saturday and Bakker is fourth, the gap drops by 16 points in one race. McGill needs to take 25 points out of Bakker across the weekend. The simplest way to do it is to win both races while Bakker finishes third or lower in both. If McGill wins twice and Bakker is third twice, they finish level on 238, and the tiebreak decides it. If Bakker finishes second in both races, she wins the series whatever McGill does.

That is a real title fight. Bakker is the faster rider on the evidence of three races. McGill is the one who has already beaten her once, on the day conditions got difficult. Baltimore on Saturday is the race to watch.

Europe has not started: no televised race until 11 October

Now the other side of the Atlantic. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the heart of professional cyclocross, there have been no UCI classification races for elite riders yet. There are no World Cup points, no Superprestige points, no X2O Trofee times and no series leaders. Every European standings table is empty. That is normal for late September. What is new is how the first weeks are sold to viewers.

The first televised race is on 11 October in Dendermonde. It opens the HG Cross, the seven-race series that was called the Exact Cross for the past four seasons. On 18 August the organiser, Golazo, announced that the Dutch cleaning products company HG had replaced Exact as title sponsor on a two-year deal with an option for a third. Sporza will show every HG Cross race live, from Dendermonde to the final in Sint-Niklaas on 13 February. A correction on our own work: CFP’s season preview on 9 September still called it the Exact Cross. The name had changed three weeks earlier.

After Dendermonde the calendar speeds up quickly. The HG Cross goes to Meulebeke on 17 October and to Heerde in the Netherlands on 24 October. The Superprestige starts the next day, 25 October, in Overijse; in Belgium it is shown on Play Sports and Pickx+ Sports, with highlights on Sporza. The X2O Trofee opens on the Koppenberg on 1 November. The European Championships are in Zeddam from 6 to 8 November, and the World Cup does not begin until 27 November in Ostrava. By the time the World Cup has a leader, the American series will have been over for almost two months.

That gap matters for the riders in the USCX. The early American races are mostly for riders based in North America, plus a few Europeans who want early UCI points, like Bakker. For them, September is when their season counts. For the big European names, the season has not started, and for some of them it may not start at all.

The biggest names have not said if they will race

The last winter ended with Mathieu van der Poel winning his eighth elite world title in Hulst and Lucinda Brand winning the women’s title. What stands out now is how uncertain the plans of the biggest names are.

Van der Poel told Wielerflits that the road Worlds in Montreal, where he took bronze on 27 September, was his last race of the road season. Asked about cyclocross, he said: “The cyclo-cross season? I haven’t thought about that yet.” His partner, Roxanne Bertels, is expecting their first child in January. The World Championships in Ostend are on 29 to 31 January. “Becoming a father for the first time is very special,” he said. “We’ll see.”

Fem van Empel, a three-time world champion, stopped racing in late 2025 and took a break for her mental health. On 18 September FDJ United-SUEZ signed her with immediate effect for the rest of 2026. A cyclocross return this winter is expected, but no race programme has been published. “Above all, I want to have a lot of fun,” she said. For Wout van Aert, Tom Pidcock and Thibau Nys, CFP found no published 2026–2027 cyclocross programme as of 30 September.

That is the context for everything above. The only major series standings in the sport belong to riders most European fans could not name. That is not a criticism of Beshir or Bakker. It is a description of where the sport is on the last day of September: the racing has started, but the attention has not.

What to watch in Baltimore, then in Dendermonde

Charm City Cross in Druid Hill Park is the last USCX weekend. It decides two series. In the men’s race, look at Saturday first: if Beshir wins, the series is over before Sunday. In the women’s race, look at where Bakker finishes. Second place in both races is enough. Third place opens the door for McGill.

Then the season changes country. The first HG Cross in Dendermonde will give us the first European results, the first sign of who kept their form over the summer, and the first real start list. If van der Poel, van Aert or Pidcock appear before the World Cup, it will probably be in one of these October races. If none of them do, the European season will begin the way the American one did: with the specialists deciding it among themselves.

So which of the two leaders do you expect to still be in front on Sunday night? On what the first four races showed, Beshir is close to safe and Bakker is not. We will update the USCX 2026 standings after Baltimore.

Sources

• USCX / RaceResult — official 2026 USCX series standings, elite men and elite women, points per round
• Cyclingnews — Rochester day 1: Bakker and Mattern win, Bakker’s return after surgery
• Cyclingnews — Rochester day 2: Beshir’s first USCX win, Bakker doubles up
• Cyclingnews — Roanoke day 1: Bakker and Beshir solo wins
• Cyclingnews — Roanoke day 2: McGill ends Bakker’s streak, Beshir’s third win
• CXhairs — 2026 US UCI cyclocross calendar and the three-weekend USCX format
• Cyclingnews — van der Poel’s road season over, cyclocross plans open (citing Wielerflits)
• Cyclingnews — Fem van Empel signs for FDJ United-SUEZ
• Sporza — Exact Cross becomes HG Cross; every round live on Sporza
• Sportpress International — HG Cross 2026–2027 calendar and sponsor terms
• Sporza — 2026–2027 cyclocross calendar and broadcast listings
• Veldritkalender — Belgian and Dutch calendar, opening 11 October

Related reading

• Our cyclocross 2026–2027 season preview: calendars, courses and the star problem
• Who is Fem van Empel?
• Worlds Montreal road races: van der Poel’s bronze and the final medal table
• Who is Tom Pidcock?
• More race results

CFP is a cycling news digest. This report is built from the official USCX series table and the independent coverage listed above. It covers elite men and elite women only. Series points are as shown on the official USCX RaceResult table on 30 September 2026. The Cyclingnews results table for Rochester day 1 printed the men’s gaps in an hours format (for example 0:12:00); CFP reads them as seconds (+0:12). The same Cyclingnews table lists Mia Aseltine third in the women’s race, but the official series table awards third-place points to Lauren Zoerner and fifth-place points to Aseltine; CFP follows the series table. Race dates are the Saturday and Sunday of each weekend per the published calendar; some report pages carry the following day’s date. The USCX tiebreak rule was not published on the standings page. Rider programmes are as reported to 30 September 2026 and may change.