Ok, not to cement my obsession with cyclocross this holiday break, but I feel compelled to talk about some minutia of the races that have been so plentiful from November until now. Particularly the UCI World Cup races that have been shown live on YouTube that have transported me to Northern and Western Europe and made the darker days of winter more exciting.
Minutia #1 (I don’t know when the 2nd one is coming): There is music that plays throughout the cyclocross races – mostly Euro Techno-styled stuff that is pretty recognizable that I don’t know the name of (haha). However, one specific piece of music is played right before the race starts. It’s played in the last minute before the red signals on the starting line turn green, which then signals the riders to begin their sprint for the first turn and get the best position to begin the race.
At first I thought it was just sort of a musical clock-type snippet that was custom-made for the race. But, With all things being searchable on the Internet, I just simply typed in something like “music before the start of UCI World Cup cyclocross race”. Thanks to a Reddit post someone answered with the composer and the song title – Eric Prydz – Opus. Using that to search YouTube, I came up with two choices. The first is a simple music video with Prydz’ music and a glass-rendered logo:
The second was a much more frenetic visual from video DJ Roger Mendez:
You can see how this music builds to an an ever faster metronomic tempo that builds the anticipation of the start of the race. It’s a 9 minute piece so they obviously don’t play the whole thing.
So not only am I confirming my obsession with the details of my cyclocross watching, but also my guilty pleasure of occasionally listening to Euro-technika house music. Needless to say this inevitably leads to rabbit hole diving and finding more about the Swedish DJ and record producer. His debut Opus album was released in 2016.
The Internet was built for rabbit chasers like me.
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