Pro Bike Check: Ben Frederick’s Ti Cyclocross Mosaic XT-1, Most Recent UCI-Approved Bike

If we needed to guess what the latest bike on the UCI-approved record was, we’d have by no means anticipated it to be this lovely, however decidedly typical Mosaic XT-1 titanium cyclocross bike. However when elite American bike owner Ben Frederick discovered he was heading to Czechia to race the opening spherical of the CX World Cup in Tábor, Mosaic had to ensure he may line up at first along with his two custom-painted XT-1 cross bikes.

So we caught up with Frederick within the pits, to get a better take a look at his titanium twins and to seek out his Small Monsters…

Mosaic XT-1 titanium cyclocross bikes of Ben Frederick

(All images/Cory Benson)

So, as an alternative of some wacky new aero-shaped carbon highway or gravel bike on the prime of the ‘most just lately permitted’ column of the UCI’s record, it’s these typical welded titanium Mosaic XT-1 cross bike.

In actual fact, the XT-1 isn’t even formally within the catalog of the Boulder, CO bike builder. The X-series technically received phased out and changed with the G-series as gravel pushed cross out a couple of years again. However Mosaic is a killer {custom} body builder. And all their bikes are “made to order from scratch together with rider particular geometry, configuration and selection of end work” so we’re fairly positive they’ll nonetheless make you an XT-1 if you wish to do some severe World Cup cyclocross racing.

Hey, it’s already UCI-approved… so long as you get the identical 56cm body and geometry like Ben Frederick raced this weekend in Tábor.

Frederick’s Tábor twins

CX Pro Bike Check: Mosaic XT-1 titanium cyclocross bike, Ben Frederick's race bikes animation — click on the person bike pics beneath to zoom in in your favourite

CX Pro Bike Check: Mosaic XT-1 titanium cyclocross bike, Ben Frederick's white back

Curiously, it could have simply been permitted final Friday on November twenty first, however these aren’t even brand-new bikes.

That’s the fantastic thing about titanium. Ben already raced these two on the circuit final season. I suppose the UCI didn’t discover him on the beginning traces. However after the season, Mosaic stripped the bikes down, and repainted them in-house of their Spectrum Paint & Powder Works paint store, in an much more colourful model.

Nebula on white or white on Nebula, you determine!

CX Pro Bike Check: Mosaic XT-1 titanium cyclocross bike, rainbow front end

For the 2025/26 race season, Frederick’s titanium Mosaic XT-1 beauties get completed in a particular version of Mosaic’s Artist Sequence hand-painted Nebula paint job. However the format is a Ben particular, designed with coloration block stripes that match his personal {custom} racing package.

And identical to final yr, the bikes are mirror photos of one another. The place one bike is white with colourful logos, the opposite is Nebula blue, purple & orange with white logos. Plus, that therapy even makes it into the wonderful particulars and logos of the Enve fork and Ritchey bar, stem & seatpost.

Killer consideration to element!

CX Pro Bike Check: Mosaic XT-1 titanium cyclocross bike, white front end

Then, for optimum model factors, there’s loads of matching purple & orange anodized Chris King elements.

Plus, a full suite of ultra-limited version Problem Workforce Version tubulars with purple sidewalls. Ben raced most of his early US season on Grifos. However he broke out some newer Flandriens for the marginally more difficult circumstances of the frozen Czech course. It was frosty with rock-hard ruts wherever it stayed in shadow. However a grassy prime layer thawed in some locations within the solar, which noticed a lot of racers slip out unexpectedly in a couple of corners, together with Ben primarily based on his muddy left hip late within the race.

So, which of the 2 bikes is your favourite look? We predict Ben’s should decide the one with the Nebula painted toptube and the Small Monster on the seattube, since he rode that one the entire race on Sunday!

Small Monsters

Ben Frederick is a bit distinctive on the UCI Cyclo-Cross World Cup circuit, as he races on the elite stage of the game, however holds down an everyday full-time job. We actually know him by way of his gross sales and repair job at biking clothes firm OrNot.

However moreover OrNot he was additionally a Ritchey athlete. That’s once we first realized of Ben and his Small Monsters undertaking, a nonprofit “to scale back the stigma surrounding psychological challenges and supply training and sources about concussion and different traumatic mind accidents“. See, again in 2015, Ben had a season- and finally racing career-ending crash with a traumatic mind damage that spiraled right into a severe psychological well being battle. He fought with melancholy, anxiousness, after which an consuming dysfunction that ended with him hospitalized.

“Battling a psychological sickness could be like having a BIG monster, scary and unseen,” says Frederick. “My hope is that individuals can carry their monsters out within the open to make them smaller, and study to stay with their little monsters.”

Ben says he realized to stay along with his monsters. And now he races with them on his package and his bike, each to always remember his personal battle and assist others to know they aren’t alone.