Tommy Nankervis

Downer’s Grove

// August 23rd, 2007 // A Day Down Under

Hey there dudes,

Last weekend we raced the Downer’s Grove criteriums. There are two of them, the Open race on Saturday, for Pros, cat 1, and cat 2 riders, and the Sunday one, for Pro only. This is a pretty safe course, which is really cool, with nice wide turns, and no dodgy corners, unless of course, it pisses down with rain!
Our view out the hotel window for both Saturday and Sunday looked a bit like this, well, actually, this was it:

Fun!
The circuit has 8 turns, and makes a bit of a figure ‘8′ around the town of Downer’s Grove. It is the coolest course, and also doubles as the USA National Criterium Championship for the Sunday race.
This year, the race was again taken by a non-American, in Martin Gilbert, of Canada, afer Hilton Clarke won the 2006 edition. Kirk O’bee won the National title though, and will get the stars and stripes jersey for the next year. The race was full of stacks, and good ones too. They reckon there must have been at least one crash every lap. Basically, after i got through the first 25 laps, and it started to rain heavier, i realised it was a matter of time before i went down too! With 62 laps, and 8 corners per lap, that made 496 corners, where a crash seemed pretty likely – not to mention the chances on various man-hole covers, or crazy riders who like to crash in the straights being the cause too!
With ten to go, i thought we might be right, and i had Evan up the front, just behind the Kelly guys (who ended up winning), and then some crazy guy decided to crash in front of me with seven to go! I went straight over the hangers, onto my back, and landed in the gutter hard enough to skip up it too… pretty painful! Evan, who started to miss the crash, had his wheel taken out from in front of him, and began a flip, to miss going head first into a tree by millimeters! Luckily we were able to get back in to the race before 5 to go, and get up the front again. There was another big pile up in the final straight, which we avoided this time, and Ev pulled through for 7th place, and i got 11th, thanks to the dudes who decided to crash!
Here is my jersey that i crashed in. Although it doesn’t look bad, it does add colour to the post for you loyal readers!

After we got back from the race and got cleaned up, we headed down to the lobby and ordered a Pappa John’s pizza, and some bread sticks. It was so good! Here, big Ev and Matt show how much they’re enjoying it, even though Matt looks like a deer in headlights! Another cool thing, is Matt Shriver has now joined the missing saddle crew, with an upgrade to the bad ass blog site! Actually, another internet thing to check out, is that of our star team mate, Neil Shirley, who has now got a real website! Check them both out!

I am now back in Athens, and actually finding motivation to do 4-5 hour rides, which is pretty bad ass, seeing as the season is coming to an end shortly, and it is about 105 degrees every day… Maybe i will have to have a crack at the Warny or something! There is talk we may get to race the Sun Tour, so that would be a pretty good finish to the season… Let’s hope we can get in! Part of the motivation for the long rides is this bridge i get to ride under. I reckon it’s so cool cruising under this, and really gets me in the mood to do a decent training ride. Only trouble is, its only fifteen minutes into my training ride, on the way to the coffee shop! It is pretty cool though!

Well i have a weekend off racing this weekend, and after that, the Americans will contest the USPro Road Race, in Greenville, SC, and then the Monday will be the Atlanta 100km Classic, won last year by… Lightnin’ Jeff Hopkins, so we’ll be hoping he can repeat that again in a fortnight!

I am off now, as i need to watch some TV, Crocodile Dundee II is on! Also, i am interested in having some more comments to read, so if there is anyone out there who usually makes comments, but hasn’t been lately, then please make some comments. If you don’t usually write a comment, feel free to make one too, it gives me something interesting to read!

Huckfactor fact: Did you know Benjamin Franklin invented the rocking chair?!

Laters…