Jeremy Powers (Aspire Racing) was hoping to turn a frustrating season around at the 2017 USA Cycling Cyclo-cross National Championships on Sunday, but the 33-year-old was unable to claim his fifth career title on a frigid afternoon in Hartford, Connecticut.
Stephen Hyde (Cannondale-Cyclocrossworld.com), who formerly rode for Powers' Jam Fund development team, rode to a maiden championship victory on the snow-covered course. Powers finished a distant 24th, three laps down.
The result marked another disappointment for Powers this season after what looked like a promising start at the Rochester CX Cup, where Powers took back-to-back wins. Subsequently derailed by injury and illness, Powers hit the reset button this winter, eschewing a trip to Europe for a training camp in New Mexico — but he was not able to turn that into a result on Sunday. Nevertheless, he told Cyclingnews after the race that he still felt capable of contending in the events left on this season's calendar.
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"I didn't do a four-week block in New Mexico with great power numbers and hard dieting and all the things that I was doing to get prepared for this event event to walk away with the end of the year as a flop," he said. "I put in two really hard training camps at the beginning of the season and then again in the last four weeks, and I just feel like yeah, it's time to try to show up. I don't know, I can only tell you what I feel and I feel like I've got everything, the entire package, but it just hasn't come together for me. I don't have answers but that's what we'll race for."
Powers noted that he felt fine at the start of the race, but things quickly soured out on the tricky, icy course, beginning with a traffic jam on the first climb of the day.
"The first time up that hill we just kind of got a little sideways and then shortly after that, next lap, I had a pretty good crash in the woods and hit my knee real good," he said. "Truly, the other guys were better today. That's the fact. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't technically good enough."
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