AusCycling CX National Championships 2025: Course Preview
The AusCycling Cyclocross National Championships will return to Ballarat this year, as Australia’s fastest and finest cyclocross riders head to Victoria Park to race for the green and gold jersey on Saturday August 16th.
The following day a UCI Category 2 (often abbreviated to C2) will he held on the same circuit, with riders in the Elite, U23 and U19 categories racing each other for prize money and UCI points. Sunday’s race will be the second year in a row of UCI racing at CX Ballarat, and in 2025 it will also be the seventh and final round of the AusCycling Cyclocross National Series (CXNS).
The Course
The racing this weekend will be held in Victoria Park, 5 minutes drive west of the Ballarat CBD. The race village will be hosted along Military Drive on the north side of the park, and will house the start/finish line, registration area, team tents, food vendors, toilets and showers.
This will mean a starting sprint on the tarmac start straight, leading into a gentle left-hander before a nervous right-hand turn onto the grass after around 200m. The pace is sure to be high early on, and the slippery transition from bitumen to wet grass has claimed more than one overambitious rider on previous race days.
Photo: CX Ballarat
After that there will be a couple of tight hairpins in quick succession that will reward riders who can position themselves at the front of the field, before riders have a chance to change out their muddy bikes as they pass the course’s pits for the first time.
Riders will then head south towards Poplar Road for around 500m. In 2024 this was a minute-long and reasonably straight power section through the heaviest mud on the course, and required a mix of finesse, power and good line selection to ride quickly. Judging by the course map for 2025, it looks as though there will be a few more tight and technical turns included to increase the difficulty.
Once riders come to Poplar Road they’ll turn right (in 2024 it was a left) and begin the setup for the course’s main feature: a short, steep hill officially known as Mount Holled-Smith, but simply dubbed ‘The Mound’ by race organisers.
It’s best to think of The Mound as two runs, separated by a short downhill ride. The first run will only be around 50m long, but a large step-up at the top of the rise means that all but the most skilled riders will need to dismount.
After a quick remount, riders will descend for a few seconds before a right-hand turn takes them into the second and much harder of the two runs. Age group riders will have to run (or ride, for the very strong) around 75m until they reach a left turn halfway up the hill and begin descending.
There’s no such mercy for the Elites, though - the ‘Pro Only’ section will take the riders almost to the very top of the mound, requiring 25-30 seconds of running up a grade of more than 20%. Check out this video of the Elite Women tackling the ‘Pro Only’ line on lap 1 of last year’s national championships - those run-ups are no joke!
Once at the top, riders will need to make a quick remount on uneven ground before flying downhill and into a left-hand turn that’s likely to be very muddy. After taking the brief downhill off the mound, riders will have likely had their last bit of respite for the lap, as the journey back to the event village at the end of the lap will tax the legs - and likely the drivetrains - of all competitors.
As the course heads back towards the race village for its second half, it becomes flatter and less technical, with long stretches through flat grass - which would likely be very fast were the race held in summer. The phrase ‘tractor pull’ has been used more than once to describe this section in previous years, and got heavy enough in 2023 that even the most powerful of the Elite riders found it quicker to get off and run rather than try to slog through the mire. Riders who have a pit crew and a spare bike will get some respite at the end of this section, as they’ll be able to swap for a fresh machine at the second passage of the pits.
Once the pits have been passed, riders will take on a new northern section of the course that mixes harder-packed short straights which should provide passing opportunities with a number of hairpins that will place an emphasis on cornering skill, especially in the wet.
Riders will make their way around a pair of soccer pitches before preparations begin for the final sprint. The course seems to hug the edges of the soccer field fairly closely here, and although it’s not been raced before we suspect that this part of the course will be firmer under the wheels than earlier in the lap. The location of the course’s barriers hasn’t been confirmed, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see them here.
A final sweeping left-hander takes riders into the home straight, where a 100m sprint on tarmac awaits. This stretch is short enough that it’s unlikely a rider challenging from behind will have the time or speed to get past a rival, so leading into this stretch could prove critical.
The weather
This will be the fourth year in a row that Ballarat’s hosted a major Australian CX race, and like the previous three years conditions are predicted to be cold, wet and muddy.
Based on current forecasts rain is projected to fall heavily on the day prior to the big event, which should see riders reaching for their mud tyres and running the lowest pressures they can get away with. The rules regarding tyre width have been relaxed in the past couple of years to allow tyre widths of up to 42mm for non-UCI categories (all categories except Elites, U23s and U19s), but a running a tyre that wide - especially a gravel tyre with minimal tread - is likely to be a very slippery and heavy affair!
In 2024 a similar amount of rain fell on the Friday prior to the national championships, leading to very slippery mud for the age group racers on Saturday morning before some afternoon sunshine made things grippier for the Elite racers in the afternoon.
The race organisers have already confirmed that a full-sized pit area and two power washers will be at the disposal of riders and pit crews who want to switch between machines while racing. While mid-race bike swaps are commonplace in European racing, they’re seen much less often in Australia, and almost never more than once in a season. The recent mudfest in Adelaide for round 5 of the CXNS and the high likelihood of heavy conditions in Ballarat mean that we might see three separate races in a season with bike swaps – so the Ballarat pressure washers will be working in full force!