For the first time in his career, Cameron Mason will begin the UCI Cyclo-cross World Cup campaign as one of the favourites to take the opening race win. The 12-round series begins on Sunday in Tábor, Czechia, and the Scotsman will start on the back of a streak of form that has earned him two second-place finishes in a season in which he has regularly fought for the podium.
Though the Koppenbergcross at the start of the month was the first of those second places, last weekend was the best yet for the Seven Racing rider. On Saturday in the Telenet Suprprestige in Merksplas, the 25-year-old battled to a determined fifth place, later admitting to slightly overdoing it off the front early in the race.
“We just couldn't get rid of each other,” Mason told Cyclingnews after a snowy mid-week ride in the Scottish hills. “If we could, we would have, and there's a reason why it was so close; it’s just small margins in that last lap. You really have to know how to win as well as know how to ride the fastest.
“I haven't won at that level, and up until now, it didn't really matter, because I hadn't actually been close in my head. A couple of years ago, in the Superprestige in Boom, I got second. I was 30 seconds back the whole race, and nothing changed. That was just a very honest second place. I didn't go home thinking it was a big opportunity, whereas now after after Koppenberg and then Hamme, I definitely could have done things differently, and that maybe would have been the difference.
“I rode the first two, three laps of Hamme, thinking, ‘I'll just be the front soon, it doesn't matter.’ Whereas Merksplas was like, ‘I wonder if I'll see the front,’ and then when I did, now what? I wasn't really planning to be in the front. So, I think that was the progression; if there'd been a Monday race, I would have known I'm definitely strong enough to win. That’s the confidence steps that I took in just those couple of days.”
Koppenberg was Mason’s first battle with Nys, and while the result there was the same as in Hamme, Mason believes this season has been his best to date.
“Without a doubt. The numbers are clearly better, I'm healthier and definitely happier, so it does make sense that that has gone into the results, but it's not a given, you know how sport works, you can do everything right and then it still doesn't work.
“But from what I've learned in the last couple of years, I'm able to apply my best-ever shape into the racing because some people never manage to do that. So, it's nice to have that confirmation that it’s working.
“But I'm getting similar results to what I did a couple years ago, but I'm easily 10% better, maybe even 15% better, so that just shows it's not linear, you can't expect to get 10% out of the results, because you think you've improved 10%, it doesn't work like that.”
His first season riding for the Seven Racing team, part of the wider Alpecin-Deceuninck stable, in 2023-24 was a huge success, the Scot showing he was able to compete for the top 10 all season.
While second place at the European Championships was the standout result, there were other successes, including podium finishes, and Mason proved his worth among Europe’s best. However, despite a successful defence of his British title and a late-season rally, the 2024-25 campaign was not the progression Mason had hoped for.
“It felt like a big step down,” he says ruefully. “In some ways, I stayed the same, but that was the lesson; you can’t afford to just stay the same, you can’t afford to not improve because the sport moves on without you.
“Momentum is such an important thing in ‘cross because it goes very quickly; there’s a race every five days. I started with absolutely no momentum, it took two months to get any sort of speed and feeling back, it felt like things were just like getting away from me, which is just the worst feeling, it was like a runaway car.
“The best piece of advice I was given at the time was to stay calm and be smart and not to do anything drastic. That advice was good, but to use that advice, you just have to be so patient, you have to just be okay with being shit at so many races, but meanwhile it's ripping you apart, and you can't do anything about it.”
The end of the season last February brought a reset. In conjunction with the Scottish Institute of Sport, he began working with a strength and conditioning coach, first building strength before turning that into explosiveness, gaining muscle and putting on five kilos in six months.
“Because the bar was so low, the only way was up. I made such big gains in just two, three months, doing the gym two times a week, creatine every day.
“It's probably the biggest physical change my body's gone through since age 20 to 21 because I'm quite a late developer. It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't gone to the gym, but the gym was combined with on the bike stuff, like I didn't do strength intervals on the bike because I was doing so much on the gym, but we were sprinting a lot more in training. And I think that really helped to kind of just increase that peak value.”
The extra bulk and explosiveness are clear to see, and his improved sprint helps him get off the line faster, allowing him to take his place near the front earlier in the race.
This, though, is only part of the equation. There’s a confidence about Mason now - he even did his post-race interview in Hamme in Dutch - and this maturity may be the key development, the reason he’s able to gain the experience required to convert podiums into victories.
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