What a great day! I am really loving racing criteriums. I love flying through the turns and I love how quickly the race can change. Today I feel I did well at meeting most of my goals. I really wanted to stay in the top 5 of the field for the entire race. Any time I'd find myself slipping back I'd work to move back up. My second goal was to be 1st or 2nd going into the final turn. That was obviously the goal of everyone and I went through 7th or 8th-not exactly prime sprinting position.
The officials had me down as 4th. As nice as that would have been I know that 1,2,3 went to Diane, Jillian and Jamie. I also knew Melanie flew by me because I fought hard to catch her. I'm sure there was also someone passing me on the right. Most of us ladies hung out and tried to put together what we remembered about the finish. I ended up with 6th but unfortunately some of my teammates got jipped out of a position at all and were given DNFs even though they were in the pack for the final sprint. I wish they would have had names attached to the numbers because Kris and I would have known that Breanne and Gail were in it until the finish. It sucks but I can also remember from my time as an official how hard it is to get numbers and it is even harder when you have a lot of people from the same team finishing.
I stuck around and watched the Men's 5 and the Women's 123. The Women's was a great race with Laura H. in a huge break with 2 PC women. They worked her and worked her and she hung on forever like a champ until she had nothing left. I'm interested in finding out what the penalty was for the PC woman that dropped back to get lapped to help her teammate. I'm sure that is a big no no!
It was a great day and I look foward to celebrating one year of racing (minus the racing I missed from the elbow) at Bear Lake next week.
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4 comments:
Super job out there today! And great picture! I like the way the photographer captured you looking back to check on the pack.
I saw the final results and noticed that the list was a couple racers shorter than the first list, but I didn't realize it was because they DNF'd some of our own. That sucks! I was only aware of one DNF and she wasn't from our team. Maybe if I could hang with the pack longer for these crits I'd know more of what was going on. >:-(
One point: It should NOT be hard to do this. The UCA bought a camera to record the finishes. It's laziness on their part to not record how the races played out accurately.
Heck, a simple camcorder could solve this in most cases.
They are screwing people out of upgrade points, trophies, prizes and more when they decide it's not worth their time to do it right.
The UCA camera last year was crap. I don't know if it has been fixed or upgraded. I agree that it is important at every level to get the results right. But watching those films frame by frame is time consuming and they usually don't have enough refs or time to do it. I am just happy to be racing and only worrying about my results and not officiating and worrying about everyone's results. Personally I think everyone should have to officiate a few races before the ever get to upgrade. It is a tough job and we are lucky that Missy, Cindy, Gary, Robert, Holly and Richard are willing to give up thier weekends to do this for us.
Thanks Rios! My 13 year old was the photographer. I'll let her know you are impressed with her skills!
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