Beverbeek, wake up it's time to race!

Bernard KOCIS Journal
07 March 08

Oh the boys got a wake up call at this race. Cold, windy and overcast. And to add to the stress, one of our riders suddenly (after 40min on the road) exclaimed, “I forgot my shoes and the bag they were in”…OK, here’s a Bill Woodul mechanic clinic test question (not really but this is how a lot of questions make it on the test)- In this situation what do you do? Given that you are driving the whole team (DS and swannie have gone ahead) and the travel time is 1.5 hrs and you are 40 min into the trip.
Hard question isn’t it? If you turn around to retrieve the shoes you put yourself 80 min behind schedule and very close to arrive too close to start time. If you keep going, you have a rider who can’t start (or get very lucky and somehow find shoes he can borrow).
And the answer is………………..??

Much to my surprise another rider asked the offender what size shoe he wore and straight away a shoe bag came sailing into his lap. He tried on the pair offered and felt he could race with them. Whew….dodged that one!!

Gets better though, after we arrived at the venue and began setting up, the same rider mentioned that his helmet was in the same bag as his shoes….Hey, no problem I said as I tossed him the only spare helmet we have. Of course, he possesses a head that’s a bit larger than normal and the spare helmet sat lightly on top of his head with no chance at all of coming close to fitting. OK, another test question…what do you do?
This answer fell to our DS who knew another team DS and asked to borrow one of their helmets (same brand but very different graphics) that would fit.

By this time all the boys were changed and ready to sign in and warm up, the frame numbers were attached, tires pumped, they were off.

As the boys departed for the start, Steve, Josée and I took a moment to note all the things we needed to change and improve before the next race.

Beverbeek went poorly for us. Although Steve drew 12th position in caravan (out of 32!) it didn’t do us much good. One rider punctured less than 12k into the race on a 4 lane (very wide) highway when the caravan was trying to get around a crash and back to the peloton which means there was a line of team cars going WFO in the left lane while my rider was further left trying to get to the right curb for service….almost every team car had passed before he was able to get to the right where I changed the wheel only to get him back in so Comm. 5 or 6 could watch him and waved us off when we tried to pace him back to the caravan…..bad luck. A few k later, we came on a group that included all but 2 of our remaining riders, at this point over 9 min behind the lead group of 60 riders.
A large chase group made contact toward the end of the race and our stalwart duo came through in 68th and 84th place. Somber rider home.

Equipment wise- Been having some difficulties keeping headsets from loosening. Found a couple more loose ones after the race….have to try something else.
Also made a discovery, the nipples on Shimano Dura Ace Tubeless wheels are REVERSE threaded. I tried to make a simple adjustment to one wheel and found it getting all out of sorts. Took me some time, I admit, to realize why. Guess I overlooked that bit in the instruction sheet!

I’m thinking it’s beer o’clock now, time for relaxing.
Ciao
Bernard