It’s been a steady few years of improvement for Durango’s Ivan Sippy at the USA Cycling Cyclocross National Championships. Sippy, a junior at Colorado Mesa, remembers first competing at the national championships as a freshman in high school with Durango Devo. He finished in the 30s. Fast-forward to last weekend in Louisville, Kentucky, Sippy is now a national champion.
Sippy won the men’s varsity collegiate national championship on Thursday, won the collegiate team relay with Colorado Mesa on Friday and the Mavericks finished first in the omnium.
“It was a big goal of mine,” Sippy said. “I've always been close to winning. I've been on so many national champs podiums with top fives and top 10s so it was eating at me a little bit that I've been so close and hadn't gotten it done. So, the collegiate race was a bit of a weight off my shoulders finally winning one. It was awesome. The collegiate race was chaotic. We had a good battle as a group of five or six of us the whole race. It was just really close racing.”
Sippy finished first in the collegiate varsity race in 53 minutes and 28 seconds. Colorado Mesa’s Jack Spranger finished second with the same time and Owen Clark from Brevard College finished third with the same time.
Spranger and Sippy are roommates at Colorado Mesa. They’re great friends and have been racing together since they were juniors.
“He's my main training partner, too,” Sippy said about Spranger. “We lift each other's level up quite a bit throughout the year. So it's cool to go to a nationals and also compete with that guy that you train with every day for a national championship … it's good because we all know the course and it's every man for themselves, which is a fun part. With Jack and Henry (Coote), I know their strengths and weaknesses probably more than the other competitors.”
Colorado Mesa’s Henry Coote led late in the race but washed out coming out of the final pit. Sippy was right behind him and got tangled up, allowing Spranger and Clark to get back into the race.
Sippy then knew he had an advantage on the barriers as he was one of the only guys hopping the barriers with other riders getting off the bike and running over them. Sippy made his move at the barriers and came home with the victory.
The conditions on Thursday were pretty dry for the collegiate race, according to Sippy. He said this allowed it to be fast and more of a group race. The conditions got muddier as the weekend went along, which allowed more lines to form and more mistakes to happen.
Sippy and the rest of the Colorado Mesa relay team won the varsity team relay by 11 seconds in 33:29. He enjoys going all out for one lap for his team.
On Saturday, Sippy finished second in the U-23 men’s race in 52:36. Coote won in 52:11. Sippy said it was a similar field to the collegiate race with a few exceptions.
The Durango native flatted at the start of the U-23 race and lost 20 positions. Luckily, his friend Keiran Eagen lent Sippy his bike as a second bike. Therefore, Sippy could pit and use Eagen’s bike the rest of the race after the flat.
Despite all of his impressive results, Sippy said he doesn’t do a lot of cyclocross but he enjoys the discipline. He described nationals as a big end-of-the-year party. He enjoys seeing all his friends on different teams and all the spectators coming out to watch.
While Sippy and the Mavericks took a lot of the top spots last weekend, the Fort Lewis College cyclocross team came to compete and the Skyhawks finished third in the omnium.
“It was a successful weekend,” FLC cycling coach Chad Cheeney said. “The conditions were perfect, like ever-changing. Everybody was just really into being the best. So there was a lot of tire changing leading up to their races, all these fine details. They were just stoked on the whole thing. So that just really fun. We did better than we thought we were going to do as a team. That was due to our depth. We just had really strong finishes from the middle chunks of our team.”
FLC was led by Natalie Quinn’s third-place finish in the collegiate women’s varsity race. She finished in 43:20 and was 31 seconds behind winner Vida Lopez De San Roman from Milligan University. Sabrina Hayes finished eighth in the women’s varsity race in 45:51.
Cheeney said Quinn is the team’s “franchise player” and that she goes so hard every time she’s out there racing. Quinn knows how to compete in every discipline.
Adrian Magun was the top Skyhawk in the men’s collegiate varsity race, finishing in 12th in 55:19, 1:50 behind Sippy. Jacob Olander finished in 15th in 56:10.
Quinn, Hayes, Olander and Magun represented FLC in the collegiate team relay and the Skyhawks came in fourth in 34:27, 57 seconds behind Colorado Mesa in first.
“It’s a pretty fresh crew,” Cheeney said about FLC’s relay team. “Jake, (Olander) it was his first team relay. Sabrina had done one on the mountain bike. Natalie has done a lot of them and Adrian, this was his second. So we’re relatively fresh with Natalie again being the leader. But it's like a one-lap time trial and so it's just a numbers game. We rode just as fast as, if not faster, as some of their race lap times the day before, when it was even a little faster.”
Cheeney said the conditions were pretty different every day. The one constant was the course would be frozen in the morning and would thaw sometime around noon. Cheeney raced in the men’s singlespeed race on Sunday and said there was so much grass in the mud that it was hard to keep his bike rolling and shifting.
Another Durango local who stood on the top step of the podium as a national championship was Cooper Wells. The son of Durango Olympian Todd Wells, Cooper, 10, won the national championship in the junior men 11-12 age group. Wells finished the race in 22:35; he was 35 seconds ahead of second-place Jack O’Donnell.
“It feels pretty awesome,” Wells said. “I've had so many people come up to me and say, ‘awesome job’ or something like that, so it feels pretty good.”
Although it was Wells’ first time competing at the cyclocross national championships, he knew he wanted to win it on Sunday. It wasn’t going to be easy after Wells started on the last row and had to make his way through the field. But the conditions were muddy which he loves and is confident in.
Another rider got a gap on the field while Wells was making his way toward the front but Wells made up time in the techie sections, the corners and hopping barriers on his bike. With a few laps to go, Wells had gapped the field and took an easy victory.
Behind Wells were fellow Durango riders Ian Barton in fourth place and Owen Morozowich in fifth.
Wells trained for the national championship using his dad’s training program. Wells also was helped by Chad Cheeney and Durango Devo as well as the local cyclocross race series.
Todd Wells was in the pits during the race in case Cooper needed to stop for a bike change. Todd would also go to different sections of the course to watch Cooper.
“It was awesome,” Todd said. “He has been super into bikes and especially cyclocross for quite a few years. So, with his passion for the sport and how much he loved it, it was so nice to see him have a good race there and be competitive. It was great. He was sleeping just a few hours a night the whole week; he was so excited … We had a great presence from Durango and it was really nice to be a part of it.”
bkelly@durangoherald.com
