Road Nationals Officially canceled for 2020

By now, I’m sure many of you have read the announcement of USA Cycling deciding to cancel Collegiate Road and Para-cycling Nationals, due to the impact of COVID-19. In case you haven’t, the tl;dr is that road nats are off, at least for 2020.

“Did it have to be canceled? Couldn’t it just be postponed?”

The decision to cancel such a major event is not one that is ever taken lightly. Over the past few weeks, when it became apparent that the original nationals date was increasingly perilous, USA Cycling and the collegiate conference directors have been working to identify any working alternatives. Ideas such as postponing nationals to a later date and/or combining with another national event were thrown out, but ultimately any of those ideas caused more problems than they actually solved. Thus, the clear option became to cancel for 2020.

“But I bought a license for this year, and now I don’t get to use it.”

Calm down, calm down. USA Cycling did just announce that collegiate licenses can be used to race any USA Cycling race. That may not have gotten widely publicized yet, although to be fair, COVID-19 threw a big wrench into a lot of plans. There will be some additional annoucements regarding USA Cycling Membership to come (again, in due time), but the bottom line is that all is not lost when it comes to your license for this year.

“Anything on Collegiate BMX Nationals?”

Nothing that I can share right now. At present, USA Cycling and USABMX are talking though some options, but no definitive plans are in place either way.

To the graduating seniors and graduate students out there

I am truly sorry that your final season has been cancelled, as I for one was really looking forward to it, and really wished to see you all in collegiate action one last time. And I know it hurts many of you to lose out on a season or a potential national championship in this way. But in the grand scheme of things, one cycling season is a pittance to how much this virus is affecting everyone globally.

The three things that I want to say to anyone graduating is that first – this doesn’t need to be the end of your cycling career. There are plenty of fantastic events, both USA Cycling sanctioned and not, in virtually any discipline you choose. Keep the rubber meeting, er, whatever surface strikes your fancy. Secondly – USA Cycling is currently evaluating some option for graduating students to compete at nationals next year. Nothing is concrete yet (I mean, the cancellation was just announced a few hours ago), and there are a lot of hurdles to work out, but as soon as I know any more, I will pass that information along.

Finally-even if I never run into you all at a race venue again, I wish all of you the best of luck in whatever the next step of your life may be. I’m hoping that whatever time you had in collegiate cycling was valuable, and that you can take some lessons and memories forward into your respective careers.

Anything else?

If anyone has any other questions that I haven’t addressed here, feel free to drop me a line at bryan.garfoot@mwccc.org and I’ll do my best to answer it.

If you’re stuck indoors and looking for a riding partner, I would encourage you all to use social media to connect with one another. I personally am not much of a Zwift user or a Discord user, but I can try to set something up if people would like.

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