Crunch Week

It never fails. The week before the Tour de La, or for that matter almost any other major weekend operation, something unexpected pops up to throw a monkey wrench into the works. It looks like this year will be no different. On the plus side, the weather forecast doesn't look disastrous, which sometimes happens. On the minus side, there are a lot of loose ends this year and I'm expecting a ton of things are going to have to happen between now and Friday. We're trying to slightly scale back some of the race's expenses to accommodate the smaller turnouts that have come to be normal over the past few years since the Lance bubble burst. We're all really missing those 50-rider Cat. 5 fields that used to provide a lot of the race revenue as well as a lot of the future Cat. 4s and Cat. 3s. Interestingly, the Cat. 1/2/3 fields don't seem to be suffering as much as some of the others. Anyway, I've definitely been thrown a curve ball this week.

Where we are now

For well over a year our office has been planning on moving from University Square near the uptown campus to the 1555 Poydras building downtown across from the Superdome. The process has been moving along at a glacial pace amid various considerations of timing, space, renovation costs, etc., especially since there hasn't been a huge sense of urgency about it. A couple of months ago, however, the renovations to the space at 1555 were underway and it finally looked like it was actually going to happen. Last week it was looking like the actual move was two or three weeks away because of a delay in getting the new furniture delivered. Things that have to do with space at a university, however, are never that simple.

Where we're going

At the end of last week we were basically given the order to pack up and be ready to go by the end of this week. Naturally, this is also the week before the Tour and the week in which I'm planning on taking Friday off so I can take care of all of the last-minute issues, print out waivers, load  up vehicles, and go across the lake in time for Friday night registration.

So after I finished up the 2017 Race Bible on Sunday, Candy and I went down to her office where they have a big copier and printed out and stapled 150 ten-page, front and back, full color, booklet format copies. At least that's out of the way! We are still desperately seeking follow cars and lead vehicles for the road races on Saturday morning, which sadly is the normal situation for this sort of thing. Despite having raised a lot of sponsorship dollars, we'll be lucky to break even given the relatively low turnouts for races over the past few years.

Covington always
makes a nice
poster for the crit.

I remember when we put on the Tour with about $300 in cash and a bunch of merchandise prizes from the bike shop and no police or toilets or parking or anything. Oh, how times have changed.  For the road race we have 10 police officers, five or six officials including motorefs, and a venue budget of well over $3,000. Sunday's criterium in Covington involves another $2,500 in police costs. The whole event, which might have 150 - 175 riders in a good year, costs around $14,000 to put on. Figure over $100 per racer with total net entry fee revenue of maybe $7,500. Ain't nobody gettin' rich here! Just last week I was looking at a plea from one of the big Florida promoters trying to get people to pre-register for one of the races there because he needs 200 riders pre-registered in order to no cancel. If we could get 200 riders around here most of our problems would go away and we might actually come out ahead. Anyway, hopefully we will muddle our way through the weekend, not screw up the results too badly, keep everyone out of the hospital, and wrap up a fun race for the 46th consecutive year, not a single one of which has been a "given."

Another unfortunate consequence of the Tour weekend is that I am off the bike and stressed out for two or three days. I was happy to have managed to get almost 250 miles in last week despite all the rain. This week is looking to be kind of rainy through Wednesday, but after that it should be nice until the rain starts moving back in some time on Sunday. Hopefully we'll be able to get through the criteriums before any of it hits, but it's way too early to tell at this point. At least there doesn't appear to be any threat of severe weather.

Our mayor's name is Mitch. He can mobilize resources
to remove statues like nobody's business.  Not so much
when it comes to routine city services or crime prevention.

Sunday's Giro was a little odd. Everything was pretty normal all the way out to the turnaround at Venetian Isles - moderate to fast pace but nothing severe. I was hanging out near the tail end of the paceline since my legs were feeling a little sore from Saturday. I was expecting to go harder on the way back. As usual, I didn't stop under the "turnaround tree" where a lot of the Giro likes to take a quick break and soon found myself with VJ, Taco and one other rider. We cruised down Chef Highway for a while expecting the pack to be swallowing us up, but then VJ went to the front on his TT bike and just towed us along at 24-25 mph for miles and miles. For some reason the rest of the group had decided to take it easy on the way back and we never saw them again. After we got back to Marconi I turned back and rode the other way until I finally saw the group coming over the Bayou St. John bridge. Sometimes these things happen on the Giro!