Watching Crashes

Tour de Jeff, neutral roll-out

Things are heating up in more ways than one as COVID concerns wane and people envision a late but active road race season. With that we are seeing more riders on the group rides, which by the way seem to be multiplying weekly. Tulane has outdoor graduation ceremonies this week, so most students have already gone back home. The university's COVID testing has therefore dropped dramatically, with just faculty and staff being tested once every two weeks. Positive tests had been running between zero and two for weeks anyway, so at the moment things are looking pretty good in the city where mask requirements for vaccinated people have been essentially discontinued. I expect the Tulane COVID dashboard will be suspended soon, although I'll continue to monitor city and state numbers in case we see a surge from one of the variants. Louisiana is lagging behind most states in per-capita vaccinations, so I'm still a little uncomfortable about sounding the "all clear."

Deciding if the bike is rideable after the crash

On Saturday I headed out to the Giro Ride start around 6 am, leaving the headlight at home for the first time in a long time. As riders started to filter in to Starbucks a long-lost Bill Short walked up to say hello. He had contacted me via Strava a few days earlier to confirm the Giro details because he was going to be in town for, I think, his daughter's graduation from Loyola. Bill had attended Loyola and was part of the Loyola collegiate cycling team while there. With Dee Harper as its advisor, that small team had survived for many years, and was probably the first official collegiate cycling team in the state. Bill and I spent some time catching up during the warm-up along Lakeshore Drive, and once things picked up I was glad to see he was having no difficulty at all with the pace. He's lives in the D.C. area. Anyway, Saturday's Giro wasn't quite as fast as normal, although it had its moments, probably because the Tour de Jefferson "ride" was the following day. For some reason the Tour de Jefferson has gotten to be an annual de facto race for the Giro Ride crowd, and is sometimes referred to as the city championship. This is despite the fact that the route involves lots of turns and u-turns and is generally not set up as a race. Anyway, the Giro Ride was going along nicely - fast but not super-fast - until after the Goodyear Sign sprint on Chef Menteur. For a year or so there has been this little "bump" in the asphalt over on the right side of the road as we approach the entrance to the interstate. The asphalt there is not broken up or anything, and it extends only about two feet into the right lane, so it's really hard to see, and even if you see it, it's really hard to tell just how much of a bump it is. There had already been a couple of crashes there when riders hit it unexpectedly. People do call it out as we approach it, but even that doesn't always work. Indeed, it didn't work on Saturday. I was toward the back of the group there and had just warned people about it when, up ahead, someone hit it and crashed. Fortunately the rider looked OK, which is  more than could be said for the bike. A bunch of us stopped, of course, but at the time someone had already been off the front with a string of riders chasing, so the front part of the group never knew what happened. Anyway, he ended up calling to get someone to come out and pick him up, so we continued on. Later, someone who had been behind it posted video of the crash.

I was up early on Sunday to drive across the river to the Tour de Jefferson start. Parking was a little bit limited so I wanted to get there early enough to get a spot in the park parking lot rather than the roadside. This was a 50 mile route with, I think, six U-turns, so I was expecting it to feel like either Intervals or a Criterium, or both. Either way, I knew it was get fast. Lining up for the start I looked around and could see that almost everyone near the front was a regular Giro rider, as expected, so this was clearly going to be a fast Giro Ride on an unfamiliar course with enhanced bragging rights. To make things more interesting, there were a few miles of the course with traffic cones separating the left lane from the right lane. If you've ever ridden in a group on a road where there are traffic cones you know that unless you're in the front five or over seven feet tall, you can't see traffic cones. Being one of the smaller riders in the group just makes that situation worse, and stressful. The whole time I was just waiting for someone to hit one of the traffic cones and launch it into the middle of the group. In fact, Jeff did hit one of them that fortunately went in the right direction rather than the wrong direction.

As expected, things started out pretty fast after the 2-mile neutral section behind Bill Burke's car as a handful of riders at the front alternated attacks and chases. Within a couple of miles the entire front group was basically the Giro Ride group. Despite all of the attacking going on up front I was kind of surprised it didn't seem harder. There were occasional lulls that brought the speed down into the lower 20s (we averaged 24.5 mph), so the fast segments were never quite long enough to split the group, and with so many riders still around, there was ample draft at the back. I had loaded the route into my new Garmin, but for some reason I wasn't getting all of the turn notifications and it occasionally thought I was off course, so perhaps I loaded the prior year's route by mistake. Anyway, I never really knew where the hell I was or where the next U-turn would be. What I did know was how far we'd gone, so I wasn't surprised when we turned back onto the highway with the traffic cones and the speed started to ramp up again. 

This was a "ride" and not a "race" and so now unsurprisingly there wasn't a 200-meter flag or 1-km banner, or anything like that, just orange duct tape arrows on the pavement. The finish was on the park road about 100 meters after a hard right turn that I don't think a lot of riders saw until the last second. The combination of a flat course with a big group, a course set up as a ride rather than a race, and riders, may of whom had little actual race experience, riding as a race rather than a ride, made this particular situation a little sketchy, to say the least. I was happy to stay at the back where I could watch. 

Well, we approached the turn at around 30 mph. The first couple of riders flew through criterium-style, and then one rider decided to go straight rather than try to make the turn. This is always a disaster. Even in criteriums where riders are told to go straight after the finish sprint, there's always someone who forgets and turns and causes a crash. So Lane decided to just go straight. Dustin was trapped to his left so Dustin also had to go straight. Sean, I think, was anticipating the turn behind Dustin and crossed wheels with him, going down pretty hard and taking one or two others behind him down too. By the time I coasted through the turn Sean was already getting up, so I knew he was basically OK. Later that day someone posted a video of the crash from behind. Interestingly, the rider with the camera overcooked the turn himself and hit the outside curb, going down in the grass pretty softly.  

So I had a nice enough weekend with two good training rides plus the bonus entertainment of watching two quite unexpected crashes, neither of which should have happened, from behind, complete with post-crash video analysis. Sean crash resulted in some road rash, a cracked helmet, broken seat, broken pedal, and somewhat torn-up shifter, but fortunately no ambulance rides. I hung around for a while for a plate of jambalaya and was back home around noon.

This morning at 6 am I looked at the radar and figured I'd better try to get in a ride right away. There was rain all around and the promise of lots more. I made the right call. As I turned around into a bit of a headwind at Williams Blvd. on the levee bike path I felt the first little sprinkles of rain. That continued all the way back home but fortunately never quite turned into a proper "rain," so I arrived back home just a little damp but far from soaking wet. A few minutes later the rain got heavier, and it's looking like it will stay that way for a while, with scattered thunderstorms in the forecast through Thursday.