The Tour

Well, another Tour de Louisiane is in the books and after three days off the bike, I was happy to be riding again this morning. This year's race went surprisingly well, especially considering the fact that two of the three races were on new venues. When online registration ended at midnight on Thursday I was both surprised and concerned that the number of pre-registrations had already exceeded the final total field size of last year. In recent years the race has attracted 160-175 riders, but this year we ended up with, I think, 203. The Cat. 4 field, in particular, was large, and with nearly 60 riders on the narrow winding roads of the road race course I was a bit concerned even though we had five moto-refs and follow cars on hand. As it turned out, though, the riders were well-behaved and there was only one crash in the Cat. 4s and no significant injuries. In the Cat. 5 race there was a little problem in the last turn that caused one of the guys to have to make a hard chase back to the field just before the finish, and around that time Dustin's derailleur hanger broke off leaving him stranded just a few kilometers before the finish. Amazingly the LBS had a spare on hand, so he was good to go by the time trial. The switch to a morning road race was welcomed by the riders and officials alike, making for a much more comfortable time out at Stoney Point. As usual, Robin and Brian worked hard over a couple of days getting the courses in shape, sweeping corners, putting up signage, and setting up the water, Gatorade, neutral feeds, pop-up shelters, etc., etc.

The road races looked quite competitive for most of the groups. Shortly after the last of the five groups departed the start line we got word that "there was a head-on collision involving a car!" It seemed like it took us forever to find out that it involved two cars and no bike riders. Whew! Apparently some yahoo in a hurry to get wherever those people go on Sunday mornings got impatient behind one of the groups and decided to pass on a blind uphill curve despite the double yellow centerline. The oncoming car saw him coming and went for the shoulder (and brakes) but they hit at a slower speed anyway. We officially DQ'ed the car.

I think we still had a couple of races out on the course when the Chief Referee's laptop slipped off of the table and the Firewire connector to the finish line camera broke. Considering that we had two big sprint finishes coming, this was nothing short of a potential disaster (well, we do have a backup camera that uses tape, but results would have taken a lot longer to do). Somehow Shane managed to get it all working again, more or less, with a USB cable before the big Cat. 4 and Cat. 5 finishes. We were able to get the RR results posted at the TT location over an hour before start time, which was good. The only problem was that nobody knew where they were posted because we didn't really know where we would be able to set up until we got there.

The TT was about as nice as you could ever imagine. Silky smooth fresh asphalt, dead flat, light tailwind, and minimal traffic. However, it was really hot for those of us doing the officiating - almost two hours of standing in the sun saying "five, four, three, two, one, go!" every 30 seconds. Then we drove back across the lake to New Orleans and I spent a few more hours finishing up the TT and GC results and posting the interim results to the NOBC website. I finally got to bed around midnight.

I was the first to arrive at the lakefront on Sunday morning to set up the criterium. For a while I just stood there trying to figure out where to put the finish line, pylons, officials, etc. Finally the rest of the crew arrived and Robin wisely suggested moving the finish closer to the shelter, which worked out fine (I had been a little worried about putting it too close to the downstream turn). The Masters race, which was the third race of the day, was going along nicely when, with just a few laps remaining, we got word there had been a crash down at the far end of the L-shaped course and an ambulance had been called. It was local racer VJ who had crashed and as it turned out he'd broken his femur (he's probably in surgery as I write this). His rear tubular was rolled off of the rim but otherwise the bike looked pretty good. In fact, he had very little road rash at all. From what he said, things got a little sketchy in the fast u-turn and he got forced off of his line by another rider. There was a bit of a bump in the road coming out of that turn and my guess would be that when he hit it he either skipped a pedal or it just lifted his rear wheel off the ground and when it all came back down the tire rolled and he hit the asphalt hip-first, still clipped in and with both hands no the bars. He seemed to be in good spirits that evening in the hospital, but that may just have been the painkillers talking.

The rest of the races went off pretty much on time, but as the morning wore on the wind started to shift and the Cat. 4s and Cat. 1,2,3s had to contend with a strong crosswind coming from the lake. The result was that both races blew apart really, really early, and the result of that was a ton of lapped riders and complete confusion among the officials. About two-thirds of the way through the Cat. 4 race I finally finished up the results of the prior Masters race and asked the Chief Ref if he was having any trouble keeping track of the lapped riders. He just shook his head and said he didn't have a clue at that point as was just writing down all the numbers he could for each lap and would have to sort it out later. It took him the better part of an hour, during which time the Cat. 1,2,3 race was going on, to make the official finish list, and even so, there were a number of riders who fell through the cracks or who didn't get scored for the correct number of times they were lapped. All of the riders at the top of GC were fine, but results for those down around the middle and end of the GC list were pretty sketchy. Basically, it was chaos. I've already made a few corrections this morning. I had thought that the Cat. 1,2,3 race would be different since those guys are a lot stronger and more experienced, but within the first few laps I knew we were going to have problems. By the time we were halfway through I had riders (who were lapped) begging us to pull lapped riders. By then there were already some lapped riders who had re-integrated into the groups that had lapped them, and besides, we didn't have the results spreadsheet set up to properly calculate finish times for pulled riders, so we left them in. As usual, this resulted in confusion among the riders about whether lapped riders were allowed to get in with the groups that lapped them and whether they were allowed to work with those groups when they did. It's always a bit of a grey area since you have to know if a rider dropped back intentionally to assist a rider who has broken away. In this case it was pretty clear that the dropped riders were dropped because they couldn't hang on to the group in the crosswind. Here's the rule: "3D4. Riders on different laps may work with each other except that no rider may drop back to assist a rider who has broken away from the field [disqualification for accepting such assistance]." Kind of open to interpretation. The revised Track Points Race rules deal with differently nowadays, stating, "Riders who lose contact with the field, and are then caught by the leaders, may not lead [disqualification]. Riders attempting to gain a lap may not accept assistance from riders who have lost contact with the back of the field. Riders attempting to gain a lap may work together, but no sacrifice of a rider's position to the advantage of another rider shall be allowed." Anyway, I think if we have similar conditions next time, riders will know beforehand that lapped riders will be pulled.

Again, for the top riders the final results were fine, but there were a few who were missed by the finish line camera or assigned the wrong number of "laps down." Very unusual for a Cat. 1,2,3 race, but anyway I will be adding the ability to calculate times for pulled riders to our results spreadsheet.

All-in-all the races were great and the new venues were excellent and I think most riders had a great weekend of racing. Now I just have to update the LCCS rankings for both the Tour de La and the prior weekend's Racing Rapides omnium and then reformat the results of each class for each stage of each race to upload to the USAC Results and Rankings database. Then maybe things can get back to normal for a little while. Yeah, right......