A Sunny Start

After a quick dinner down on Magazine St. with a couple of the neighbors, and with no New Year's Eve plans, I hit the sack early last night. Just before midnight I was awakened by the sound of fireworks, some of which sounded like they were in the next room. I was glad for what I didn't hear - gunfire. In years past, it was always easy to pick up the sound of the automatic weapons being fired into the air, but I detected none this year.

There must have been some cold people down in the French Quarter in the wee hours today because when I awoke the thermometer read 39F and the wind was strong enough to hear. Since it's my last day of vacation, I decided to wait for the sun to come up, and headed out for a little recovery spin around 9 a.m. It was pretty quiet out on the levee, and here and there you could see the debris of the prior night's celebrations. The wind was pretty fierce and my legs were a bit stiff, so I just did an hour and a half or so, eventually running into one of the guys who moved to Carbondale a while back and is in town for a few days. He's racing for a team in St. Louis and is hoping to bring a few guys down for Rouge-Roubaix. Will C. emailed a link to the planned 2007 Track series and revised LCCS points scoring system. Looks pretty good to me. I guess I need to get busy making the changes to the bylaws that resulted from the LAMBRA meeting! The '07 season will be off to a fairly early start this year and a couple of events need to start getting their USCF permit applications done within the next couple of weeks. Now that you can do it online, it really just takes a few minutes once you have your event announcement put together, and the date is immediately put on the USCF calendar. I also got an update from Gina V, one of our NOBC alums, who will be racing with Kenda Tire this year. She is squeezing in training and racing while doing a residency up in ATL, and although she'll probably miss some of the NRC events, I'll bet she ends up making more of them than she misses.

I'm glad to see that, finally, the UCI, WADA, and to a lesser extent USADA, are finally getting some significant backlash from their heavy-handed attempts to clean up the sport at any cost. In the last few weeks I've seen editorials in most of the cycling publications pointing out the obvious, at least to those of us in the U.S., lack of checks and balances, trampling of riders' rights to protect their reputations and jobs, conflicts of interest, etc. Just finished reading one on the PEZ Cycling News site. Anyway, I think that the riders are beginning to stand up for themselves so at least there's hope.