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What Ziggy saw:
Category: 4
Result: Delayed by crash - back of pack.
I'll never bet on a crit.
The SF Giro was a nice race. Fast in some parts, really, really lazy on the small hill. The race started of fast with lots of jockeying for position on the front. After a few laps, things settled down a bit and I found myself and Santiago at the front, which is where we stayed for the remainder of the race.
For those of you who haven't done this race, it's four corners with a very small rise on one of the short sides. Pavement sucks, but you get to use the whole road. This race should be pretty fast, but for whatever reason, the entire field would sit up every time we went up the effing rise, thus slowing us down on the back side of the course.
Santiago and I did a lot of chasing today, as the large number of prime laps left a lot of people off the front. Fast forward to lap 28 of 30. The Village Pedalers had organised a nice train of three or four riders on the front and were leading out going into the last lap. This was good as Santiago were directly behind them and we both had the plan to use their sprinter as our leadout man.
As we crest the hill at top speed, (for the first time in the race!) one of the VP guys decides he hasn't lost enough skin this season and does a solo slide across the road. This wouldn't have been so bad had he slid forward, but instead, he slid from about the middle of the road all the way to the cones at the edge of the course. I don't think anybody else went down, but it eliminated his whole team, Santiago, myself, and anybody else who took the turn a bit wide. Santiago managed to get himself organised enough to finish mid-pack, but I couldn't get the pedal thing right and decided not to contest 49th place and finished, yep, you guessed it...DFL.
For those who saw the Cat 3 race at the Timpani Crit, the UCLA guy did it again in the same exact way. He worked with a Hancock rider until the last lap and smoked him on the final straight with about a 16 second gap on the field. Paul looked good out there with I believe a top 20 finish in his first Cat 3 race with a full field of 100.
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What Santiago saw:
Category: 4
Result: Delayed by crash - mid-pack.
I think Ziggy's reports says it all, so nothing to add on that one (I'm still mad, by the way, it was the perfect finish....).
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What Garry saw:
Category: 3
Result: Did not start.
I went to ride, but did not pre-reg. There was a full field, all but six spaces by 10 o'clock for a race at 1:40. I arrived at 11:45 and they were taking names for the reserve list. I was 109th and seven spaces were awarded. Drat.... the race looked hella fast early on and good fun, apart from the stack up on the last lap, which PP avoided. As Zig mentioned, Bernard Van Ulden of the UCLA squad did the business again.
Anyway, moral here is that you gotta pre-reg.
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