What it Takes

The weather forecast for the 45th Tour de Louisiane had been looking pretty bad all week, and I was expecting the worst. Apparently a lot of riders were too, because pre-registration was below 100 riders when it closed at midnight on Thursday. I had taken Friday off of work in order to get things ready for the trip across the lake that afternoon for Friday night registration and the ensuing weekend. It really takes a small army to make this event happen. I try to limit my own role to handling the website, race bible development and printing, bib numbers and pins, event announcement, USAC permitting, course selection and control, pre-registration, race-day registration, race-day finish line setup, officiating, race communications, and related activities. Bob and Roberta and Mignon had spent months trying to piece together enough sponsorship to make the event feasible. Feasible, in this case, means that for a year like this with threatening weather the club loses a few thousand dollars.

On Friday Robin came by and picked up our course signage so he and Fred could set up all three courses. That task involves literally hours of work prior to each stage, not to mention marking all of the turns and bad sections of road, and repairing some of them with cold-patch asphalt, in the days leading up to the event. Bob and Fred had made all of the arrangements with two Sheriff's offices, the Covington Police and Fire (first responders) Departments, along with the Mayor's office. There were also lots of little things that go into the event like portable toilets and podiums and sponsor banners and arrangements with food vendors, in this case McAllister's, the local brewhouse, in-kind sponsors for primes and goody bags, etc., etc. All of this is done by volunteers, in their spare time.

By Friday night registration the forecast was still looking bad, but there looked like a chance we might at least get race-day registration done before any serious rain moved in. We had a few new registrations during the evening, which was encouraging, but some of the categories were still really, really low.  The Cat. 1/2/3 race field looked relatively normal with some strong teams represented that promised a good competitive race.  The Cat. 4 field was smaller than normal, but the big hit was the Cat. 5 field, which was super small. Even by race day we had only 13 riders in the Cat. 5s. Normal for that field should be 40-50 riders.  By the time race-day registration was over we were up to just over 100 riders.  Normal would be more like 160-180. I was very thankful to see a number of the local guys sign up, albeit at the last minute to bolster the Masters and Cat. 4 race numbers. Even so, the missing 50 riders meant around $3,000 in revenue that the race needs to even approach breaking even in a typical year. You'd think that the $85 entry fee would provide enough to at least cover the $6k prizelist, but you have to realize that the race doesn't see a lot of that.  First, there's the per-rider per-day insurance cost. For a 2-day race that's $7.50. Then there's the online registration fee that we absorb. That's another $4.85 or so. Then there are the free registrations for club members which was $500. Plus there's the LAMBRA pre-rider fee of $2. So basically, of those riders who pay an $85 entry fee, we see about $70. To support a $6k prizelist, we basically need to raise around $6-7k in event sponsorship, which is a pretty heavy lift for an event with 100 participants. So anyway, the bottom line is that what it takes is a ton of sponsorship that we are rarely able to attract in order to do things right.

So back to the race.  Saturday morning looked surprisingly good. I can't even begin to describe the huge sense of relief once we got all five groups on the road and there was still no sign of an imminent thunderstorm. With races that would be going on for nearly four hours, though, we were still expecting rain, possibly heavy rain. We had even moved the finish line a little farther up where there was less of a roadside ditch. Somehow, Bob and Fred had rounded up enough follow cars for the road race, and along with three moto-refs we had everyone on the road right on schedule. Mike set up one of the magnetic mount antennas atop the road sign to which we had tied the officiating tent (expecting of course a torrential thunderstorm to hit at some point) and I was very impressed at how well the LAMBRA radios worked on the course. As the follow cars came around the last turn, which was at least two miles from the finish, we could hear them very clearly. We were also using the LAMBRA Zello channel, which allowed for race communications among everyone even when they were out on the back side of the 16-mile circuit. I think there was one minor crash during the road race, along with a number of flat tires (and remarkably few spare wheels in the follow cars), but in general the road races went very smoothly and, incredibly, without any significant rain.  What a relief.

After Ricky and Mike finished up entering the road race results into the computer (while the rest of the crew was taking down signage, cleaning up the venue, packing stuff into trucks, etc.) we finally headed out around 2 pm, stopping at a roadside McDonalds for food and internet where I uploaded results to the website and sent out notifications to everyone via email and Facebook. I stopped at Starbucks on the way to the TT site, arriving around 4:15 to unlock the school gate.  Robin and Fred had already starting setting up the course with caution signs and about a million traffic cones. The police officers arrived around 5:00, just before a big thunderstorm came through. I sat in my car responding to the many texts and messages asking if the TT was going to be cancelled. We had been looking at the radar and it looked like we would be in the clear by 5:15 so we delayed the start by around twenty minutes. Of course our already-posted TT start times kind of went out the window as a result, but it was too late to try and re-do those and somehow inform the riders of it, there being no dry place to even post a revised list.  The current list taped to the LAMBRA trailer was, of course, soaked anyway.  Amazingly, the rain stopped and we got all of the riders started and finished without a drop of rain falling on them. Afterward we again tore everything down, loaded up trucks, cars and trailers, and hit the road back to the hotel to do the results. I was behind Ian, one of our motorefs who had volunteered to stay for the TT and Criterium to help out. The trip to the hotel was only around four miles, but halfway there the sky opened up on I-12. I was glad I was behind him in the car to give him a little protection from any inattentive drivers coming up from behind. We got the TT results done and posted to the website and finally headed over to Acme Oyster House for some dinner, the first actual meal I'd had all day.  That night there were more thunderstorms.

Sunday morning the sky was cloudy but the forecast was looking better. When I arrived at the criterium about an hour before the first scheduled race at 6:20 or so Robin and Fred and Bob and Roberta were already hard at work setting up the barricades, hay bales, signage, etc.  We got the finish line officiating tents set up, set up the P/A system, finish line cameras, generator, radios, etc. and were ready to go before 7:30, but with only two Juniors for the first race, they both requested that they be allowed to race with the Women, which was the second race on the schedule, so we had a little breather before things got started. The streets were, amazingly, dry except for what I assumed to be some water draining across the street just before the first turn.  I kept wondering why it wasn't drying up. Once the second race started, I was occupied mostly with entering the results in to the computer and printing out results while Ricky and Mike scored whichever the next race was that was going on. I got a little time during the Masters race to walk down to the corner to investigate the water situation and discovered that there was a sump pump on the other side of the building that was literally pumping water onto the course. Luckily, it was plugged into an outlet on the underside of the old rail car that was part of the restaurant, so I unplugged it for the duration of the race. By the time the Cat. 1/2/3 race was underway the street was dry. Again, the LAMBRA radios were a huge help for the criterium. I'd given one to one of the police officers, and then another to a course marshal on the far side of the course. Robin had one as well. There were a couple of crashes, but the only serious one was when Will got into the gravel on the outside of the very fast Cat. 1/2/3 race and hit a pole with his thigh.  They drained about 50 cc of blood and fluid out of his knee this morning. Anyway, results went pretty well and after tearing down the venue and loading up cars and trailers once again I guess I was on the way back home by 3:00 or so. I unloaded everything one last time and settled down to post results to the website, send out announcements, upload the few photos I was able to take, fill out the Report of Occurrence for Will's crash, send that and the 1-day waivers to Ricky who was the Chief Ref this year, and then, finally opened up a bottle of wine.

It was a long weekend, and I think the riders had some good racing, so in that sense it was pretty satisfying. It was truly amazing that we had somehow managed to put on all three stages wihout anyone having to race in the rain on a weekend when the forecast really offered zero hope of that being a possibility. Now we just need to figure out how to keep the race going for another year, because there's no way we can go more than a year or two without at least coming close to breaking even, and I'm pretty sure we were a very, very long way from breaking even this year. Of course, there are a lot of things we could to do save money, but they would all tend to lessen the quality and fun of the event. We could cut back on the number of toilets, not pay for motorefs and hotel rooms, move the criterium to a parking lot or someplace that didn't require half of the Covington police force, move the road race to a course with fewer intersections needing police, etc.  I hope we don't have to do any of that.