Jipped at Snowshoe (24 hrs of..that is)



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Nate

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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 ******** 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.
 
<big snip>

Sandbagging really sucks. A few years ago some buddies and I entered a 12 hour race in GA as
beginners. We were all borderline beginner/sport riders but none of us had ever done a multi hour
event so we figured beginner class would be about right. We had an unusually good race (no mishaps
whatsoever) on a day were it seemed everyone else was having problems. We ended pounding the entire
beginner *and* sport class, and actually placed in the top 5 of the experts. We felt really guilty
about it and everyone was calling us sandbaggers. We even tried to get the race organizers to move
us up to expert class with no luck.

Anyway, I don't know how someone could do it intentionally. We all felt like we were ruining
everyone elses race and it really made it hard for us to enjoy the otherwise fun race.
 
> Anyway, I don't know how someone could do it intentionally. We all felt like we were ruining
> everyone elses race and it really made it hard for us to enjoy the otherwise fun race.

To solve the problem, everyone should enter expert.

--
Phil, Squid-in-Training
 
Phil, Squid-in-Training wrote:
>>Anyway, I don't know how someone could do it intentionally. We all felt like we were ruining
>>everyone elses race and it really made it hard for us to enjoy the otherwise fun race.
>
>
> To solve the problem, everyone should enter expert.
>
>
Or just don't give out prizes, race for fun.
 
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