Tour Divide Race: Day 11, The Italian Job
Unprecedented mud and mosquitoes continued administering penalties on the middle-of-the-pack on Fathers' Day. Steve McGuire, who pioneered lodging in Forest Service latrines as a low-cost recession-savvy alternative to b & b's, just couldn't warm up and bowed out in Dillon, Montana. Steve is a strong rider and a guy with a huge heart who orchestrates nonprofit bike programs in Iowa City. For Steve to drop says volumes about the particular difficulty of '09.
And a scandal has emerged as Brits Alan Goldsmith and Steve Wilkinson report witnessing the two Italian riders rolling down the tarmac at the lodge on Togwotee Pass where the trail meets the highway. The Italians, according to Wilkinson, were clean as roadies--an impossibility in recent trail conditions. He confronted them in something of a Wyoming spaghetti western Tour Divide standoff, The Good, The Bad and the Muddy. Listen to Steve's account at tourdivide.org. Note that there is still no drug testing in Divide racing, but it's very difficult to not get busted cutting corners when a satellite is tracking your movements on earth.
The Love Shack attack of Jay and Tracey Petervary was blessed with a big tailwind and blue skies in the Great Divide Basin and has caught the chase group of Kurt Refsnider and single-speed speedster Chris Plesko in Rawlins and now the four riders make up the chase group. Matthew Lee's SPOT dot shows him across the Colorado border, drinking coffee and eating chocolate cake at my favorite refueling spot on the route, a former country schoolhouse now called Whispering Pines Lodge. Kirsten, one of the proprietors there, is a big fan of the race, which rolls by within a spit watermelon seed of the lodge's front porch. Picture this: a tattooed young blonde in a smart white apron, her feet kicked up, smoking an American Spirit cigarette, drinking from a bowl of coffee and checking out the SPOT dots on her laptop as racers near the Colorado border.
I'll close with a call-in from Yakima, Washington racer Eric Bruntjen and what may seem to the uninitiated like a descent into madness, but it's typical critical thinking as the field enters day 11 of the toughest bike race in the world:
Hi there, Eric Bruntjen calling in from the Tour Divide. I’m in Flagg Ranch, Saturday the 20th. I came over the pass today on a mucky road, just getting clobbered by the rain. Makes it really tough out there for me in that wet mud, cold. I had a few mechanicals. I lost a sleeping pad, broke a spoke, had no rear brakes coming down, used my spare brake pads, fixed that. Just now running on almost no front brakes, going to have some pads sent to Rawlins. Hopefully I can make it there. I had a chance to ride today with Joe from Minneapolis--he was in Lima for 24 hours waiting for a part. That was great--I don’t normally get to ride with guys of that caliber, and he left me behind pretty quick. But it’s just an amazing thing to be out riding with guys like that. The way he motored up the passes today really impressed me. Other than that, the mosquitos are crazy. They’re not that big, but there are millions of them. Riding today behind Joe, and he was a couple miles ahead, and you could see clouds of mosquitos coming. You know, you just kind of think, maybe that mosquito that just went into my mouth was just eating on Joe, because there’s so many of them, they fly right in your mouth. It’s disgusting. Out here I’m sure some Tour Divide riders are solving world problems and thinking deep thoughts, but today all I was thinking about was accidental cannibalism and thinking about how cold I was. I’m out and I’m going to try--I’m out for tonight, not out for the race--I’m going to try and make Pinedale by tomorrow. It’s 160 miles and the weather does not look good, it’s going to be tough, so I might make it only 120, but we’ll see. Bye. --Jon Billman
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Hi John this is a very tough year weather wise . I was over in Lima area taking pics last wed. and thursday . The roads were almost impassable for my truck in 4wd you can imagine what it was like for the riders . The conditions do not look to be getting any better for the back of the pack .
Posted by: Andy Buchanan | June 22, 2009 at 07:11 PM