I see on the Interpipes that Carnegie-Caulfield have cancelled the Modella road race today due to concerns about high winds.  I commend them for this decision.  Organisers have a duty of care.  I wonder what conditions are like out at Eildon today for the Junior Tour?  Weatherzone suggests 72km/h wind gusts.  I hope we have the same level of commitment to rider safety that CCCC have shown.

Hilton Clarke had his knee replaced on Thursday last week, and while he's away I'm looking after his NTID and VIS sprint squads (and a couple of CCCC ringins), we had our first completely Hilton-Free-Day on Saturday afternoon.  The session was all K1's which is basically a load of gate starts over short distances, the format being 3 sets of 3 reps of starts, each set has reps going up quarter, half and three quarter lap, and each set goes up a gear.

Generally they all did pretty well, I had to get a little bit cranky at the end, as the drill usually finishes with a small gear quarter lap effort, and some of the lads mucked about during it, it was pretty funny, but at the same time, they're there to train and I had to make sure they did their efforts properly.  Guys, if any of you are reading this, you can horse around between efforts, but you do your efforts at 100%, or you're wasting your time and mine.

In other news, Nathan's taking a bigger role in the DISC sessions now, he's looking after the enduro stream including programming for them, and is also doing more of that at Spin.  I'm happy that this is happening, Nathan's almost finished his level 1 and he's ready to take more responsibility for that side of things.

And we had a time trial on Sunday, run by Blackburn and with CSV looking after part of it. I was the announcer, but didn't have much of a job to do except call riders to the start, which was ok for the CSV Open, but the combine part was a mess, no-one's numbers matched what was on the starting list and the on-the-day entries didn't fit anywhere.  We need to stop the on-the-day entries altogether for TT's.

I'm glad I wasn't riding the CSV Open part of it - not because I don't like TT's (which is true!) but because the CSV guys just packed up and left with no results.  WTF?!  The results are up now, which is good, but at the time they just left.   Not good enough.  I don't know if Blackburn ended up getting the results done and having a presentation for the combine event because I had to get going, but they're not currently on the Blackburn website. It's not good enough these days.  It's embarrasing to be a part of when this happens, and more importantly, keeps happening over and over.

But .. We did run a good session at DISC on Sunday afternoon, Nathan had the enduros doing handicap starts and then some brutal efforts while the sprinters did powerjumps and then chased the motorbike around and around.  We all left well fried.  Today I was at Blackburn again coaching the DUCCs but only three showed up, so instead of doing blocking practice, we did flying 200s and match sprints.  The guys enjoyed that and learned a bit so it wasn't a waste of their time.

I did get a small bit of time to speak with Mal Sawford (CCCC president) about some inter-club stuff and in particular volunteer management, but we didn't get a chance to reach any conclusion, he had to race!  At least the ideas are on the table.  I still think that the northern combine model is worth trialing.  Here's more about how they do it. Mal is skeptical about its effectiveness in our combine because he is of the opinion that the NC races require a lot less manpower to run, but I think it's worth a try.  I guess that's up to the race committee people to sort out, but there is goodwill between the clubs and that's the main thing.

Revolution is back (after the cancelled round this winter due to some sponsor pulling out at the last minute ...).  If you haven't been to one, it's a track race night, at Melbourne Park (sometimes called Vodafone, or Hisense).  It's like a world cup but all rolled into one evening, with, so far, an emphasis on sprint events (ace!).  It's a bloody good night's entertainment if you're into track sprint events.

It's not strict UCI format, which can make for a more entertaining format at times (like the Summer Sprint Series isn't UCI format either).  There's a keirin being run there, not unusual .. what's unusual is that this time, it'll be mixed.

Mixed.  Girls and boys.  Sprinters.

Hold on a minute, how does that work?

Elite female sprinters do flying 200's in low 11 seconds, elite men are breaking 10's (Hoy rode 9.8s in Manchester recently).  So the women can't race the men, but they can race the boys.  There's not a lot of depth in the female sprint ranks.  At the recent UCI world cup there was 4 or 5 women who were competitive, the rest were a lot slower, so the women don't have a lot to race against.  Until they race junior men, who are also doing low to mid 11s flying 200's.  There's a bold thought (we do it at the SSS ... no gender seperation, grading on performance and we're not the only ones).  So at Revolution 5, Anna Meares and co will be racing 17 boys in a Keirin.

Good on 'em.

Some of you who read this might remember that I wrote a blog entry a while back about racing at Crib Point, and how I mentioned to the commissaire at the race that if they had noticed and were planning to speak to a rider for a breach of the white line rule, I saw the incident and was prepared to back up any report by the follow car.  It got a little ugly at the time as one of the rider's teammates/friends took offence and got a bit stroppy, but that was the last I heard of it.  Until tonight!

Another one of the group (www.6am-ers.com) who is also a Blackburn member and a racer of some repute sent me a long and sarcastic email tonight which he must have spent a bit of time drafting (it was quite good, entertaining in a way and oddly flattering that he'd go to so much effort), which he Cc'd to his group's mailing list.  I'm not going to publish it, but you can probably sign up to their site if you're interested, it's probably doing the rounds there on their forum and mailing list. I guess one of them stumbled onto this blog somehow and the tribe must stick together, even if the rider in question didn't get in any real trouble and it was just a reminder that the rules of racing apply to us all.  Tom Leaper got his result for the 1:20 ITT at the Dougherty Tour last year binned for crossing the white line, riders I coach have been fined for doing it too.  If I got caught doing it, I'd hope I'd have the grace to accept that I did something against the rules and I'd cop it sweet and learn from it. If anyone does it by accident and gets caught they get to learn from the experience.  I don't quite know what makes this case different, except for one thing, it wasn't accidental, or at least, that's what the rider told me at the time and maybe that's why he got so worked up about it?

Perhaps a case of The Lady doth protest too much?

I suspect I'll get another reply to my reply to him, with hopefully less sarcasm and more explaining exactly why he set out to defend something that should have been accepted at the time as a slap on the wrist and then done with. I have nothing against the 6am-ers as a group, every one I've met has been a decent person and a keen cyclist, and one of them shares a house with me.  I admire their enthusiasm and their culture, it's similar in some ways to what I've been trying to build with aboc from day 1 and I like them, if I'd known of their existance when I started racing, I'd probably have wanted to join up with them and if we race together again, I'd cheerfully form an alliance if in a break or chasing etc with them.  That doesn't put individual riders wearing their colours above the rules we race by, and the person who wrote to me I would have expected to know that.