This week… Dirt Crits, Coombesberg TT and more on AusCycling.
Clarissa flies!
Dirt Crits on Tuesday night saw another big turnout at Riflebutts Reserve with 24 entrants for an Irish Handicap. This week’s race was based on either a short or a long lap, or even a combination of the two, plus staggered start times.
First group away for two long laps were Jo Wall, visiting from Bendigo, Matt Empey, Damian Grundy, Cam Dobson and Bruce Halket. They were followed by the rest of the field at all sorts of different start times.
Grundy, Halket and Dobson faded but Empey and Wall roared ahead overtaking most of the field but they weren’t able to catch the flying Clarissa Leatham. She who won by 20 seconds from Bobby Ritchie who was just ahead of Empey. Maddy Smith came in fourth just ahead of Wall.
The handicaps were so accurate that there was only 4 minutes between the winner and eighteenth place!
Here are the detailed results.
The Race of Lies.
MMBCC road races are usually Handicap races. But two or three times a season we run an Individual Time Trial, each racer riding alone, against the clock. This elicits cliche-laden articles about there being nowhere to hide, every man for himself, the Race of Truth, etc.
This was all disregarded on Thursday when the MMBCC hosted a Race of Lies. The MMBCC super computer had a little meltdown and incorrect results were awarded at the Delatite Hotel presentations on Thursday night.
Overnight a call was put into the IT Department who told us to turn it off and turn it on again. Voila! On Friday morning we had accurate results…
The win went to Steve Curnow, ahead of Bruce Halket, Josh Hopwood (who also rode fastest time of 19.40), Allan Gerrans and Bella Green was fifth and first unplaced female. Then came Dave Moore, Alex Green, Micala Jacobs, Jarrod Appleton and AJ Stephenson.
In another example of close handicapping, with a different 24 entrants, only two minutes separated first from seventeenth!
Detailed results can be found here and many thanks again to Tony Copland for the pics.
More on AusCycling
Wade Wallace, the founder of Cycling Tips, has written a very good article explaining the proposed changes to the structure of cycling in Australia. Here’s the link to have a read.
A reminder about the voting process too… for Cycling Australia it’s the member club that votes, for MTBA it’s the individual member that votes.
Unless we hear otherwise from members, the club will likely vote in favour of the AusCycling proposal. MTBA members should make up their own minds.
FYI, below is the proposed membership costs of AusCycling. Overall, we think this is heading in the right direction but we’d prefer to see two changes… the cost of Junior memberships, especially U13, should be lower and Masters memberships for those under 65 should still be available.
The prices listed above do NOT include the club fee (the portion of the overall fee which goes to the club) which for the MMBCC is $10 for Juniors and $20 for Seniors. There are no plans to change the MMBCC club fee.