Recap and Loose Ends

Let me just say up front that I should be working right now. You know, at the job that pays, not the other ones. The fact is, however, that I'm feeling kind of snowed and felt a need to come up for a little air. The Tour de La is, for almost all of us, a labor of love. Why else would otherwise sane people who have their own lives, some quite challenging enough on their own, spend a whole weekend standing in the sun and the rain on the side of a road, or lugging drink coolers and hay bales around, or doing all of the other stuff that goes into even a small race nowadays, without even approaching breaking even on expenses?



Saturday

Saturday was the time trial and road race, and I was pleasantly surprised at the turnout. We ended up with a few more riders than last year, and considering the price of gas and time of year, I thought that was pretty good. In particular, I was impressed with the size of the women's field. We all were. In fact, we increased their prizelist from $350 to $600 the day before the race. The time trials went really smoothly this year, although we had three riders miss their starts. It was the first year we'd actually printed up and posted a complete start list with time- of- day start times and had a big race clock perfectly synchronized to the race time. After the TT ended I sat in the truck and put in all of the start times while the crew tore down the start line and the officials came back from the finish. Then the other referee and I sat down and plugged in all of the finish times. So we headed out to the road race with final TT results already in hand, which was nice. Sometimes I'm still working on them while we're driving.


The parking area for the road race was crowded with cars and racers when we arrived an hour before start time. The atmosphere was great as riders mingled under the big oak trees pumping up tires, filling waterbottles and generally going about their pre-race rituals. By the time we got the first group started I could already see a dark cloud heading our way. The question wasn't if it was going to rain, but how much and how long. Less than an hour later we learned the answer was "very much and very long." We were huddled under one of those tent things at the finish line as the deluge began. Soon the ditch, in which we were essentially standing, started filling with water and carrying off shoes, cans, bottles, etc. We ran out and rescued the big race clock (it has not yet recovered from the soaking). The women came through at the end of their first lap in a driving rain and with the thunder growing nearer and nearer I started to think we might have to stop the race. Of course, that's not as easy as it sounds when you have 170+ riders out on a 15 mile circuit in five different groups. They would all still have to ride back to the start/finish. Finally, after what seemed like a solid hour, the rain slacked off just in time for the first finishes. So here we were soaking wet with the official trying to operate a laptop connected to the finish camera powered by a hundred feet of extension cord, much of which was under water. Somehow we got good video of all of the pack finishes.


The Cat. 5 race had a big crash, and although there were competing stories about what happened, it sounded like one team was blocking at the front and a rider got frustrated because every time he'd try and come through they would shut the door on him. Knowing that we had some serious centerline monitoring going on thanks to the motorefs, his frustration finally got the best of him. If you believe one side of the story, he came up alongside one of the riders at the front and basically body blocked him, causing a crash. His own story was somewhat different, of course. The moto official was occupied at the back at the time and didn't see any of what actually happened. The guy decided not to race the next day. That was probably a wise decision. One of our riders came walking across the finish line with his chain in one hand and his bike in the other. It had broken on the last hill before the finish! The Cat. 1/2/3 race finish came just as a funeral hit the intersection immediately downstream. Once again our radios proved invaluable and the police were able to hold them for a few minutes until the sprint finished. It was a sprint for 2nd place, though. The winner had spent at least 60 miles solo off the front with one of the teams chasing hard the whole way.


It took a long time to sort out the road race results, but fortunately our chief judge was able to get almost everything from the video and by about 10:30 I was ready to upload the first day's results to the website. My shoes and pants were still soaking wet.



Sunday

Sunday morning and the sky looked much better. We were using a slightly different criterium course in downtown Covington, and the start/finish area, located at the new trailhead of a bike path, was excellent. Unfortunately the streets were still the same bumpy ones we've been using for years. They tell us it's all scheduled for asphalt overlay. I'll believe that when I see it. At some point I looked up to see Glenn Gulotta! I had to take a photo as evidence, of course. Anyway, the criterium went pretty well as I shuttled between doing results in a nice air-conditioned room and scoring/judging at the finish line. There were very few crashes, but one of them was a teammate. I didn't even know about it until the race was over, but he had been off the back and heard the lead moto coming up from behind. Not wanting to get in the way as he was being lapped, he took a couple of turns really wide, got into some bad asphalt, and had the option of hitting a pole or running into the curb. He chose the latter and ended up with a concussion, road rash from his cheek to his toes, and a ride to the hospital. Fortunately, nothing was broken. After the races ended I heard that a flying piece of gravel had taken out the plate glass window in front of one of the parish offices. Just another reason why they should fix those streets, eh? We had our traditional awards ceremony with Keith standing on the bar handing out the awards and everyone crowded into Buster's Place eating fried shrimp po-boys. Later I had my traditional Abita Turbodog and oyster po-boy.



Then it was finally time to head back across the lake to NOLA in Mark's fully-loaded truck. One problem, though. It wouldn't start. He tried and tried, but eventually it wouldn't even turn over. It's happened before when it was hot, so we walked over to the coffee shop where I spent some time setting up the web pages for the results. An hour later we tried again and it started up like nothing had ever happened. Go figure.



Monday

So this morning I had a nice easy spin on the levee. As I was riding out there I noticed that our streetcars are finally back on Carrollton Avenue! Yeah! That only took two years and nine months. Then, as we were riding back I spotted the big new Navy ship they've been building at the local shipyard heading out down the river with lots of people on deck. It looked pretty impressive.