Rouge-Roubaix is a race that began life as more of a wacko group ride, morphed into something that would have been called a Gran Fondo if anyone had been using that term back them, and eventually became an actual, official USAC race that still retains a lot of that original wacko group ride mentality. This year's edition attracted around 300 riders across its five race categories and one Gran Fondo category. While the original editions were known only to a handful of local riders, this year's race had representation from twenty-one states and nearly seventy USAC clubs. Compared with some prior years, the 2014 edition offered nearly perfect weather and, from what I hear, some of the fastest, most hard-packed, dirt and rock sections ever. Although a huge sinkhole caused the route to be shortened to 102 miles about a week before race day, the winning time of 4:09 was damned impressive, a more typical winning time being in the 4:20s.
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| A flat on the Giro Ride |
For the first time in a number of years I wasn't racing. With some still-lingering neck and back problems from my unfortunate October cyclocross experience, I thought it would be particularly unwise to subject my spine to the annual beating this year. Instead, I helped with the officiating, and in particular with the scoring and timing and posting of results. It was a very long day that started at 5 am.
Knowing I'd be officiating, and therefore off the bike, on Sunday, I was glad to be able to get in the Saturday Giro Ride before departing for Baton Rouge. Although there is no race-day registration for this event, they do have a Saturday afternoon packet pickup and late registration session from 2-6 pm, and I wanted to be there in order to check off the riders who actually showed up (there are always a number of no-shows for this race), and also to deal with the riders who didn't have current licenses, were confused about the one-day licenses, etc. That meant I had to be on the road by around noon, which worked out pretty well since I usually get back from the Giro Ride around 10:00 or so.
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| The P/1/2 staging for the start |
So I made it through the Friday night packet pickup session with perhaps half of the riders checked off in my big Excel registration/results workbook. Things on Sunday morning started at around 6 am, so I needed to be there around 5:30 to get set up. As usual, it was a little hectic, and also as usual there were a few riders who showed up half an hour after registration closed (of course we found them their numbers and got them registered). We got the Gran Fondo group rolling just four minutes late at 7:04. Their 1-hour head-start on the Pro/1/2 race was still not sufficient to keep all but one rider from being caught and passed. That lone rider must have know he was just a minute or so ahead of the race because he came blasting across the finish line like he'd won the World Championship.
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| Masters |
At the finish line, I was calling numbers and times into my recorder whenever I could, but that was really just backup in case of camera and official failure. In fact, the finish line camera software crashed about two minutes before the first riders finished because it didn't recover when the laptop went into sleep mode. Luckily Ricky was able to get it all restarted in time. So in the three hours after we started the last group, we got the finish line and cameras and computers all set up and waited. By the time the first riders were finishing I needed to pee. There was no portable toilet and we were basically in a busy residential area of St. Francisville, so for the next four or five hours I tried not to think about that. Fortunately, there was a lot to keep me occupied. Once the first riders finish, there is pretty much a steady stream of finishers for the next three or four hours. Along the way, Lisa, who was the official handling medical issues, had to deal with a rider with a broken collarbone and another rider who had clearly suffered a concussion, and possibly a broken jaw, but nonetheless had finished the race and was refusing to go to the hospital, which is pretty typical of athletes with concussions. Luckily he was eventually convinced to go by someone he was with, along with a call from his mother.
The results went relatively well, which is to say we were able to post the top 25 or so in each race pretty quickly so that the awards ceremonies could be done over at the Myrtles plantation, about three miles away. I would print the first page of the results to a pdf file and then use a mobile hotspot to email them to the promoter. It did take a long time to finish up the results. Aside from the time it takes just to type in 250 or so times, Ricky had gotten a couple of pages out of order and as a result we ended up having to go through each and every finish to figure out what had gone wrong. It was easily fixed, but cost us an extra half an hour. By the time we folded up our tents at the finish line the race clock was reading something in excess of nine hours and there was still one Gran Fondo rider out on the course. One of the moto-refs had found him and he knew we were leaving, so we headed out and someone called in his finish time. By then the post-race party was over and most of the riders had headed home, so the officiating crew and the promoter got together at the local pizza place for an early dinner, but not before I made a bee line for the nearby McDonald's men's room.
There are lots of great stories, videos and photos popping up on Facebook and email lists from the race, and although it looks like it was a good one, I can't say I am terribly disappointed at not having been able to race it. My neck is usually sore after that race anyway, so if I'd done it this time I'd probably still be in the hospital. Aside from that, I can't say it's my favorite race. Granted, it is a challenge, and there is a real sense of accomplishment once it's over, but this is a race for the big strong powerhouse riders who plow through the gravel climbs while the guys like me slide around and end up walking. Then again, there's always next year! Results are on the
LAMBRA website (and of course the USAC website), but nowadays if you want to see the photos and videos you'll have to check the
Rouge-Roubaix Facebook page. In particular, the
video of the Masters riding the final dirt section is pretty good.
Update: Photos at http://inmotionphoto.smugmug.com/Sports/Rouge-Roubaix-2014/i-FzjL96x
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