Rouge Roubaix Weekend

Rouge-Roubaix Pro/1/2 field ready to go.

The weather for the past few days had been absolutely terrible. By Friday there were flash flood warnings all over Louisiana, and the forecast for Saturday wasn't looking to improve a whole lot. Somehow, the worst of it was consistently sliding just north of New Orleans, so while people just across Lake Pontchartrain were watching the rivers overflowing their banks and flooding their houses, we were still getting in most of our regular training rides. I had innocently offered to help with officiating Rouge Roubaix some time back, largely because most of the LAMBRA equipment was still at my house and I'd need to get it up there anyway. Complicating the whole weekend, though, was an NCURA conference here in town that I needed to attend on Thursday and Friday. That put a bit of a dent in my weekday riding routine, but of course I knew I'd be off the bike entirely on Sunday.

Saturday morning rolled around and although the sky was cloudy and there was a steadily increasing chance of rain throughout the day, we got in a pretty good Giro Ride with a somewhat smaller than usual group. Then I got the bad news I'd been expecting. Ricky wasn't going to be able to come down and officiate because of all of the flooding up around Monroe. He works for the Public Works department up there, and was still dealing with flooded roads and associated problems all over the parish. It was going to be just Chris, Mike and me at the finish line, so I knew results would be coming out a little more slowly than usual. A couple of hours later I was loading up the Volvo with tables, tripods, tents, generator, and all the other stuff you need to pull of the deceptively complicated task of making a list of riders when they cross the finish line. I got up to St. Francisville around when late registration and packet pickup opened and got to work populating the multiple spreadsheets as people picked up their numbers and signed their waivers. There were the usual ones who hadn't renewed licenses, wanted to sign release forms for other people, or were running late because they'd hit a deer and the front of their car was being held together with bungie cords from a gas station. Situation normal.  We closed up registration around 7 and so I had lots of time to relax in my own room at The Bluffs as I double-checked the pre-registrations.  There were still a lot of people who would be picking up numbers early the next morning, of course. All this time the actual race course was in a state of flux. They had already had to cut out two of the prime gravel sections because of the rain and flooding, and were going back and forth about whether to bypass the "lowwater bridge" that was to take riders out of and back into St. Francisville.  It was still under water on Saturday but they were thinking it might be OK on Sunday. The police were pushing for it because the alternate route meant putting riders onto busy Highway 61 for a while. We wouldn't know the final course until 7 am the next morning.

So Sunday morning I headed back to the start, which wasn't the finish, for 6 am and we got everyone signed up. With an already announced half-hour delay because of the route change (the lowwater bridge was still impassable), we weren't too rushed and we started each of the five groups right on time. We were trying out the new LAMBRA radios for the lead vehicles. The results were unimpressive, as I would later learn. We were also trying out Zello, which actually turned out to be extremely useful. Anyway, after the start we immediately went to the finish line about a mile away. The shortened race distance was 100 miles, so I was figuring we wouldn't see any riders for at least four hours. As it turned out, the winning Pro/1/2 riders arrived at 3:47.  Anyway, I spoke briefly with the USADA representative, who was on hand to do some testing, and we got the finish line tents up, computers and cameras set, finish line down, communication equipment going, generator going, etc. We didn't have long to wait until the first riders came up the hill from the river, and from then on it was a steady stream for about 4 hours.  I guess the biggest group left had about ten riders, but there were usually no more than a couple still sprinting by the time they crossed the line.  Most were just glad it was over. I was calling numbers and times into my recorder as Chris was writing them down and Mike was writing and checking the finish line camera when necessary to confirm numbers or finish order. During the increasingly brief lulls I was entering places and times into the results sheets. After about an hour, it became very difficult to sort out the finish order for each race since the slower riders from multiple races were all pretty well intermixed. At the same time, the amount of time I had in-between finishers to do data entry was steadily decreasing, so I soon stopped entering times at all and we just tried to make sure we could get the promoters all of the placings that were in the money. Everyone else would just have to wait until later. I guess it was around 6 pm by the time I headed back to New Orleans, and nearly midnight by the time I'd transcribed all of my times and placings from the recorder, cleaned up the results, entered the times, and posted to the website and facebook pages. On the way home, I contemplated whether it would have been easier to have ridden the race instead.  Indeed, this was probably one of the easiest and fastest Rouge Roubaix races of the last ten years thanks to the loss of two gravel segments and the six miles shorter race distance. It will probably be another day or two before people stop emailing me about errors or omissions in the results and I'm comfortable sending them to Robert to upload to USAC.