With the second round of the Cyclocross World Cup coming this weekend I wanted to talk quickly about how you can watch both the women’s and men’s races live.
There are several ways you can watch each race, the easiest being a subscription to the entire World Cup on Cycling.TV. This option is available to everyone in the US, Canada, UK and South Africa. A 12-month subscription is $59.99 or a 3 month subscription is €21.99. The advantage of this subcription is that they show the full women’s race of all the World Cup for all the races (an option you won’t have available through Sporza). You will also have commentary in English.
You can always tune into Sporza’s Video Zone to catch the Men’s race, but you will only be seeing a re-cap of the women’s race as Belgian TV doesn’t show the full race. The re-caps this year are of a much better depth, with the last world cup recap a full 25 minutes, showing most of the race. This is a step above the short 5 minute recaps we have seen in the past.
This weekend you can also catch the Women’s race live on Czech TV. This is the option we are going to be using as a subscription to CyclingTV doesn’t make much sense when we live in Belgium, can record the races, and we will be attending most of the World Cups in person this year. The only problem with the Czech TV is that they geo-restrict the vieiwership. This means you need to use a bit of technical web-trickery to make the website think you are in the Czech Republic.
The website HideMyAss.com has a list of web-proxies which you can check the morning of and use one to re-route your IP address.
Just select the country from the list, then look for a proxy that is available and hopefully is listed as “High” or “High +KA” so the website thinks you are from the Czech Republic. Then follow the instructions below on how to get to internet settings to change to a proxy server. Please google around as the exact method is very different for everyone and it was no fun trying to do this while the women’s race was starting.
Web browser instructions
- Mozilla Firefox: Tools > Options > Advanced > Settings > Manual proxy configuration.
- Google Chrome: Options > Under the hood > Network > Change proxy settings > LAN settings > Use a proxy server > Advanced > HTTP.
- Internet Explorer: Tools > Internet options > Connections > LAN settings > Use a proxy server > Advanced > HTTP.
- Opera: Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network.
As with most things internet and computer related, do this at your own risk. Also, be sure to go back to your normal settings afterwards for both speed of use, but also you will get content blocked on other sites which are geo-restricted to the US or served random Google Ads in Czech.
If you can’t get to high-speed internet or don’t want to bother with proxy server forwarding you can always follow us on Twitter, we are @thechainstay, and will be giving live tweet updates of the women’s and men’s races. We will try to use the hashtags #plzen and #cx when we can.
The Start List for Round 2 in Plzen of the UCI Cyclocross World Cup.
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