The day before the big day.

Tomorrow is the Professional world road championships. This is the race most came to see. There were many spectators this week during the TT days and the Road races for Junior women and U23s yesterday. But tomorrow is supposed to be crazy.
Geoff and I split up the ten riders and prepped their bikes all day today. We had ten riders but way more than ten bikes. Geoff brought three bikes for Antonio and two for Dylan. Guido’s mechanic came to our hotel with his race bike and his spare bike. Guido came with his home bike too. We asked Chris, the Domo Mechanic, for Freddie’s spare bike also. So, we had ten race bikes, four spare bikes (Antonio, Dylan, Guido and Freddy) on top of the car and two spare bikes in the feed zone/pit (Antonio #2 spare and Guido #2 spare). All told that is 16 bikes. Not and unusual amount. Lucky for us most of the spare bikes hardly get used so those took a minimum of effort to get ready. In reality we had much more. We brought a race bike and spare bike for all other US Postal riders here at worlds. These rides were Benoit (Luxembourg), Pena (Columbia), Pavel (Czech Republic), Boonen (Belgium). Again their spare bikes need little. The race bikes came from Paris-Tours so they were in great shape. The Postal mechanics took care of the Paris-Tour race bikes so even though we had those bikes it did not take too much to get them all ready. So really we were responsible for 22 bikes.
The typical Belgium weather was in order today. Cold and wind. Combine the ton of work we had to do and the cold wind, I was super tired from today’s work. Bu It felt good to work hard because we were racing for stripes tomorrow. The last hour or so of work though, we got the third part of typical Belgium weather. Rain. Lucky it was not too much but rain nonetheless. I was just thinking how bad it was to work in the rain until I remembered the elite women were racing the last few laps of their race in this shit. A little dinner and only a couple of drinks in the bar and I was ready for bed.
We were up at 6ish this morning and finished the last of the bikes about 6 or 6:30 for a long days work. I’d better rest because Geoff wants to get up at 6 again tomorrow.