Tour de CU

May 24 or August 24?

Holy Crap! I guess June and July weren’t really necessary this year and we’ve just moved from late May to mid August. My thermometer reads 104 and 43% humidity in Chicago today. The racing in Champaign and Urbana this weekend past was no less hot. I want to thank all the great riders in all categories for coming to Champaign-Urbana this weekend for the races. I sincerely hope it was worth your time, energy and money to be at the races. Since inception, my goal has been to make these races true community events similar to the bigger crits and races I’ve done over the past 15 years. I think we’re getting the racing atmosphere where it needs to be and now I’m thinking about how to get more community involvement and larger crowds.

Got a few reports that our back up hotel was dodgy. Sorry about that. It was really the only place in town that had a block of rooms enough to give us, and I guess there was a reason for that. I was told by my event orgzizer that the hotel was being renovated and what he saw “looked pretty good”. I guess now, what he saw was one of the renovated rooms, which obviously wasn’t the room that I’ve heard of. Confirm and Verify…My bad.

Speaking of confirm and verify: The City of Urbana had been promising since January that the pavement on Walnut St would be repaired in time for the races. I went into a bit of a panic when I drove the course on Friday and it had not yet been done. My event manager called the City Public Works dept once again and was told that because of the rain on Friday, they could not do the work but it would be done on Saturday. Driving back to our hotel room on Saturday evening about 8:30 I got a call from Stone Pony asking if he was on the right street for the course because Walnut St looked like the moon. Craters. More Panic. I was at the course at 6:00 a.m. the on Sunday morning and Marek our head official and I took a look. We decided on a plan B and a plan C and when the UPW guys showed up with cold patch and shovels we knew we could not go with the original course. The course we ended up with included a 180 degree turn, which many riders were skeptical of but after the races, to a person I heard nothing but positive comments on how that made the race. Certainly in all fields, it was a tough guy race. If you have any negatives, please let me know.

Next year, what I am considering is to keep the 180, but add the part that we couldn’t race on this year to lenghten the course a bit and to decrease the importance of the 180 turn. What do you think?

All of this assumes UPW fixes the street. They have a full year now to get to work on it.

The racing in Champaign was the opposite of the Urbana course and I really like that we can have two courses that emphasize such completely different skill sets in crit racing. The Champaign course is a power, never stop pedaling wide open speed fest. The Urbana course was for those with great cornering skills and quick accelerations. Thoughts?

For both days, we had a total of 518 racers.  More on Saturday than on Sunday, which is curious to me.  I had made the assumption that since Urbana had more money and was an IL Cup race that more riders would be racing on Sunday.  Any idea on why this was?

Well we’re beginning planning on the 2011 version of the Tour de CU.  Please give me input on how this can be the best race in the Midwest.

Thanks.

Druber