"Nate" wrote in message
om...
Ah yes. Once again it was time for the 24 hours of Snowshoe. Mud,
roots and pain. I love this race. And this year was no exception,
however....

I organized a team to race Co-ed pro/am but decided to jump over to 5
person open since there was no competition in pro/am. Pam and I had
never ridden with any other riders on this years team, so we wondered
what we were in for. Everyone seemed to be pretty fast, or so they
said : )

I had noticed a few days before the race that a team racing under the
name West Virginia Homegrown had raced in the Expert Class the
previous year (named Hammerheads) and finished 4th out of 23 teams.
This year they had the same team plus one guy's wife. In the 5 person
open, your team may have 1 expert male (no more), at least 1 female,
and any other males must be sport riders. So I e-mailed Laird Knight
of this situation. The response was: We will bring this to their
attention.

At the race, the course was actually quite dry this year and more
rideable for many. We entered our team under the name Pray for Rain,
mainly to **** off those with no sense of humor.

During the race, things went as good as could be expected. We had
one very fast rider, myself and another guy were about the same
speed, and my g/f Pam and another very fast woman. Our mechanic
swapped the rear wheel between my bike and Pam's each lap, (I trashed
my crossmax the week before) and swapped eggbeaters between the other
rider's bikes as Stuart's broke right before his lap. Our second lady
was putting on make-up before her laps as if to hook up with some stud
on the trail. She showed up to her first lap without her scan-in card
but with some other team's baton!?!?! WTF??? She put out fast lap
times, so I didn't care about anything else.

During the race, the W.Va. Homegrown team was in the lead (of our
class) the whole race. No surprise there. So during the last hour of
the race, I personally found Laird and talked to him about the
sandbagging situation. He told me that the team right behind us in
3rd was going to protest the Homegrown team until they found out they
too could be DQ'd for sand bagging, so they withdrew their protest.
So I paid the $50 and put in the protest against W.Va. Homegrown.
Laird said to make it fair, I may as well file a protest against the
3rd place team too. Even though they weren't beating us, I figured
it was only fair.

After talking to the other teams under protest, Laird was somewhat
feeling guilty for not doing something about this situation before the
race, so the Homegrown team could at least switch classes or modify
their team. So after lots of controversy, (and the Homegrown team
protesting us) Laird decided to keep the final results as final.

Laird knew he screwed up pretty bad and decided to give our team extra
prizes to try to quell our anger. He even offered to refund our
team's entry fee, but I felt that was too much -- I can be a softy
sometimes. We know Laird and Elizabeth and didn't want to be complete
jerks about the situation...

At the podium, Laird apologized for the situation involving the 5
person open category to the crowd. We shook hands with the 3rd place
team and took our spot on 2nd place. When W.Va. Homegrown was called
up, mutterings of "sandbaggers" and the such were heard around. Only
2 of their riders shook our hands before hopping onto the podium.
Their team was told to consider themselves experts in the future.

Even though the ending results were jacked, we all had a good race
and some fun to boot. For all those who skipped out this year for
fear of too much unrideable mud, you guys missed out. And believe
me, there were still plenty of slick technical sections for the
sickos (myself included) who like it hard.

If I am still here come next year, Pam and I will surely be there
again. Damn, this is a great race.


Cool race report. What's sandbagging? And what exactly did they do wrong
again? They had more than one expert?

--
Phil, Squid-in-Training