The Tour de Rain

The forecast just kept getting worse and worse as we got closer to the start of the 41st annual Tour de Louisiane.  I drove up Friday evening through scattered showers with Mark to get late registration started at The Spokesman in Mandeville.  I think we had maybe 70 riders taken care of by the time we closed down at 10 pm, so I knew we would have a relatively hectic race-day registration.  Arriving at the road race course about an hour before registration was scheduled to open I was glad to find that it wasn't actually raining.  What I wasn't glad to find was that we had left the cash box in the hotel room.  I guess there was something like $1,000 in it since it included envelopes to pay the police at both the road race and time trial, along with small bills to make change with. Laura headed back to make the 40 minute drive to retrieve it, but fortunately was able to get in touch with Mignon who was still on her way across the causeway, so she was able to pick it up and get it to us in time. There were big dark ominous clouds all over the place, but for the moment at least, none were on top of us.  As usual, most of the riders waited until half an hour before registration closed to show up.  That's about when we ran out of safety pins.  We hadn't ordered extras this year since we always have tons of them left over, but unfortunately we didn't have quite enough to handle the nearly 200 riders, each of whom had three numbers to pin on. Of course bike racers always have a number of leftover pins floating around in their race kits, so somehow everyone was able to deal with the shortage.

Just before we were ready to start the first group it started to rain.  Of course.  At the finish line we had light to moderate rain for pretty much the rest of the race, but the wind wasn't bad and it never got really heavy, so we were able to deal with it all fairly well.  I heard that over on the back side of the course there were some really heavy downpours, however.  Riders were generally cautious, although there were a few falls and a number of flats.  Rolan went down on turn 2 and scraped up  his lip, among other things.  At one point I heard that someone had hit another rider who had turned around somewhere near the finish line.  Apparently Robert S. came through the start/finish, I guess alone, when possibly a rider who had just finished one of the other races turned around and they somehow collided head-on.  I'm waiting for Robert to get me some details, but as it turned out he broke both his collarbone and his bike.  I have no idea who the other rider was, since we just heard about it at the finish line second-hand.  Anyway, after the race we stopped at a McDonalds to do the results, which took quite a while since there were a lot of riders off the back of the various groups, but were able to get everything posted an hour before the start of the evening's time trial in Mandeville.

The TT was held on wet streets under a mostly light rain.  Some riders, depending on where they were in the start order, probably had a pretty significant headwind for the 3 mile effort.  By the time we wrapped everything up from that race, drove back across the causeway while I entered finish times into the computer, and got to my house it was getting close to 9 pm.  As usual there were a few issues with the times on the main finish sheet, but after consulting the sheet for the backup finish judge and the stopwatch split memory we got everything worked out and uploaded to the NOBC website around 10 pm.  I guess I finally got to sleep around midnight.  The forecast for Sunday was simple:  100% chance of rain and a flood watch in effect.  The criterium course was on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

I arrived at the criterium early because I knew the parking lot that would have normally served as part of the course would be flooded.  It was.  So I set up a big U-turn with traffic cones and started setting up the finish line area.  Above me I could see blue sky.  It wasn't raining, but looking northwest across the lake I could see big black clouds and lots of rain.  Soon I got a text from Laura telling me that the Causeway was closed to traffic because of the weather.  We rushed out some emails to inform people that we would delay the start of the first race, the Juniors, by at least 30 minutes.  Eventually they re-opened the causeway and the Juniors and Women who had been staying in Mandeville started to arrive.  Naturally, by the time we were ready to start, half an hour late, it began to rain.  A gust of wind came off the lake and crumpled one of the two pop-up shelters, so we squeezed into the one surviving one.  I'd pulled my station wagon right up to the popup tent at the finish line, and had my computer, as well as the PA system, set up inside to protect them in the event of more rain.  The cameras, however, and the laptop to which they were connected, had to be set up under the tent, of course.  So we started the Juniors in the rain and increasingly gusty wind, shortening their already short 30-minute race to 20 minutes.  Toward the end they were really battling the wind, but otherwise it worked out fine.  We rushed to start the Women's race, also shortened to 20 minutes, as the weather started to close in.  Ten minutes later the weather went from bad to worse.  For the last couple of laps the rain was torrential and the wind was probably approaching tropical depression territory in the gusts. The street started to flood and we were all standing in three or four inches of water by then.  With two laps to go we had six people, including me, holding onto the tent frame to keep it from blowing away. 

Somehow the women toughed it out and I got the results, holding the tent down with one hand, and talking into my tape recorder with the other while reading off the finish times from the plastic-covered race clock.  I'd already printed out the Junior results so I put my clipboard into a Turkey Bag and headed across the street to post them. The weather was still really bad, and while I was across the street I saw the wind collapse the one remaining pop-up shelter.  I was already soaked to the bone.  Ricky and I jumped into the car while other people tried to keep the shelter frame from damaging it and I endered the Women's results into the computer.  We had turned off the generator because all of the wires were under water, so I brought the laptop over to the shelter across the street to "post" the women's results.  The rain continued unabated and by then it was clear that we had exhaused all of our options and had little choice but to cancel the remainder of the races for the day.  So for most of the categories, the GC was determined by only the Road Race and the Time Trial. 

YES, THOSE ARE RUBBER BOOTS

Considering the weather, I guess we were lucky to have that.  It's Tuesday now and I still have damp papers and other stuff scattered all over my basement drying out. It was a long weekend and I was disappointed that we couldn't pull off the criterium because turnout had been quite good and the races on Saturday had been great despite the weather.  I got home afterward, unloaded everything, and spent a couple of hours cleaning up the results and getting them posted on the website.  By Monday evening I had the results uploaded to the USAC results and rankings database and had completed all of the post-event paperwork to send off to Colorado Springs. I sent Laura the rider waivers so she could mail out the many, many prizes that weren't picked up on Sunday since a lot of the riders just headed straight home after learning that their criteriums had been cancelled.  It will probably take Laura a couple more day to get everyhing in the mail to everyone.