Dénouement

I'm sitting here at my desk surrounded by the debris of another Tour de Louisiane. There's a thick stack of entry forms from which I still need to pull the one-day licenses to include with the post-event reports that are in a folder somewhere in my bag. The tape recorder that I use for finish judging is here too. I just went over my recording of the masters race finish looking for a rider who we DNF'd but who actually finished with the lead group. A bit stack of handwritten scoring sheets are within arms reach because I know I'll get a few emails from people who didn't check the results at the race and then, when they look up the results on the website, discover some mistake. Most are minor, really, and I always try to make corrections if at all possible. I've still a lot of work to do before I can call the 39th annual Tour de La a wrap, but at least the results are up on the website and nobody went to the hospital. I haven't even done the LCCS scoring for the District Championships yet, and I'm dreading that because they are always kind of messy. Then I'll have to format and upload the Tour de La results for the USAC results & rankings database and score it for LCCS. The latter, at least, will be relatively easy because we score stage races on GC. I doubt any of that will happen tomorrow, however, because believe it or not I do have a real job and there's a lot going on there right now. Just to complicate things I have a dentist appointment tomorrow afternoon that I know will spawn additional dentist appointments. I hate dentist appointments. So the Tour's denouement will play itself out over the course of next week. The forms will be filled out, payments will be made, reports will be submitted, and soon things will get back to whatever constitutes normal around here.

Anyway, this year's Tour de Louisiane went off fairly smoothly, I think. Although it was a particularly hot weekend, and total registrations were down a bit from the last couple of years (seems to be a trend everywhere), the racing was lively and competitive and nobody went to the hospital. The Cat. 1/2/3 had a particularly good field and the race came down to the wire with the top three places separated by one second each. Our club members and volunteers all did a tremendous job, and Ricky, our chief referee, did his usual magic with the cameras and got almost everybody placed in every race so that we could post results quickly. The City Park course was great, except for the sun and heat, although those five police officers that we had to pay for mostly just sat in their cars and watched pedestrians and bike riders wander onto the course at will. It would have been a lot cheaper and more effective if we'd not had the officers and instead just rented barricades and used volunteers. I really need to have a conversation with someone on the Board at City Park about events like ours and how their fees are just pushing them away to other cities. I guess I'll just worry about that tomorrow and go to sleep now, "after all ... tomorrow is another day."