"You can’t just race for 14 weekends and keep the same level" - Jens Dekker in favour of World Cup size reduction

UCI Cyclo-cross World Cup, will take place in Dublin, Ireland this coming weekend. After a glorious debut that brought out more than 30,000 fans last year, hopes were initially high for its return in the 2023/24 campaign. However, a series of unfortunate events has served to overshadow the race in recent weeks.

"The whole schedule is flawed from the beginning when they introduced these 14 weekends of racing," the 24-year-old Jens Dekker said to GCN. "That is just not how the cyclo-cross season operates and it has never done like that. You can’t just race for 14 weekends and keep the same level; you have to train somewhere and rest as well."

"For me, financially, it is almost impossible to go away for five weeks, which was the original schedule if you did the France-Ireland-France-Italy trip," explained Dekker – with the Troyes World Cup preceding Dublin, and Flamanville and Val di Sole soon to follow in the coming weeks.

"I have to pay a mechanic to do that and it’s just not possible, it is too much money, it is a full month’s salary basically. Most riders rely on volunteers to do that, but even then, people can’t take a month off from work to just travel around Europe."

Tom Van Damme, Chairman of Belgian Cycling, suggested to Het Laatste Nieuws this week, that perhaps it is time to reduce the number of World Cup rounds in Belgium.

"To be honest, I’m kind of in favour of having one World Cup round per country," agreed Dekker. "That wouldn’t mean 14 rounds, it would probably be a maximum of 10 with some growth opportunity in the next couple of years. That would probably be a better system to have a little less concentration."