Still on the Sidelines

NOBC Cat. 4 Riders ready to race.

The forecast for Saturday wasn't looking all that good and I was scheduled to officiate at the Vuelta d' Acadiana criterium over in Lafayette later that day. In New Orleans, however, the weather was pretty great, so I went out to meet the Giro Ride crowd even though I knew I wouldn't have time to do the whole ride. Turnout there was a little low, probably because some riders were racing in Lafayette that weekend and a few others, the Tulane riders, were racing in Houston at the Rice University race. We had a new rider, Adam, who had just moved here from a couple of years in Japan with the Navy. He's stationed at Belle Chasse now. The ride, at least as much of it as I was able to do, was pretty normal. Once we hit Hayne Blvd. the pace went up to 25-27 mph and stayed there. We lost Adam somewhere around the end of Hayne, I guess. I stayed with the group until Chef Highway, then reluctantly turned around to head home. I saw Adam was with a few other riders, so that was good.

I figured that I needed to leave for Lafayette around 9:30 am, which didn't give me a whole lot of spare time, so I pushed the pace a bit all the way back home, took a quick shower, loaded up the car, and took off more or less on time. It's a bit over two hours to Lafayette on I-10, so I would easily be there an hour before the start of the first criterium at 1:00.  Along the way I drove through a few rainstorms, and it was still raining a little bit when I arrived. We got the finish set up and started the first race of women and juniors about on time. The street was still pretty wet and there was a light rain falling on and off. One of the women crashed on the U-turn just past the start/finish and as we learned later broke her hip. Those aren't as common as collarbone fractures, but I guess I've seen four of them over the years with people I know. Anyway, pretty soon the sky cleared up and the road dried up, so the rest of the races had pretty good conditions. The officiating went very smoothly and I guess we finally packed up and went to the hotel, conveniently right across the street from the race, around 7:00 or so. Then the other three officials and I went for a quick dinner at a little local seafood place. I spent an hour or two cleaning up the day's results and posting them to the LAMBRA website before hitting the sack around 10:30.  The next morning was going to be a early one with the first race scheduled for 7 am.

Sunday's races were on a course up around Arnaudville that they have used a few times. It's a nice loop with an out-and-back section to the start/finish.  The out-and-back section is not too great for a few reasons.  Traffic always seems to be an issue for the finishes there.  Anyway, we arrived in the dark and got the finish area set up before sunrise and sent the first race off about on time.  All of the other races were supposed to start an hour later, which was going to be a problem since the first race would be probably be finishing as we were still starting the other races. Well, first thing we hear on the radios was that the lead vehicle had turned at the wrong road and so the whole race was off-course. Fortunately, they could just continue and that road would meet up with the correct one. I don't think all of the riders even realized they had been led astray.  Anyway, we got all of the other races started and that's when things started kind of going downhill from an officiating standpoint.  One of the cameras wasn't recording, so we just had the lower camera. There had been a lot of riders who had ridden in different categories the prior day than they were racing in that day, and since they hadn't been assigned new numbers in the correct sequences, we didn't know just from the number which race they were in. Also, some of them were listed on two different results spreadsheets since it was an omnium.  This got really confusing later when the breakaway of the Cat. 1/2/3 race caught the Master's race a couple of miles before the finish and we ended up with riders from both groups coming across the line at the same time.  Since we  had only the lower camera, and the riders had only side numbers, there were a few riders we couldn't identify because they were hidden behind other riders at the line. Basically the results were kind of a mess and it took us a long time to straighten them out.  I was still correcting some things today. The worst part of the whole weekend, though, was not racing. I don't feel like I'm really quite in shape to race right now and had already decided to skip this race and give the collarbone a couple more weeks. I had been thinking I'd go with the Tulane riders up to Rice and maybe get in a nice ride while they were doing the road race, but then Ricky called and asked me to officiate because his wife had been in a car accident and was a little banged up.