Staff Member, Secretariat of the Race Office of the Organizing
Committee of the 2006 Tour de Hainan.
On the one hand it sounds a lot more impressive than it felt. On the
other hand, there was that time in Xinglong when I was left alone in
the office for about two hours and ended up, among other things,
answering a phone call from Xinhua News Agency and actually knowing the
answer. And there was the time I helped the Shimanos find the
Mongolian national team so they could get some spare wheels back
completely in Chinese and completely by virtue of having Secret Inside
Information.
They felt comfortable enough leaving me alone in the office such that
my hotel room was the office, even if, after Wenchang there turned out
to be no other incidences of a non-Chinese speaker calling I was
trusted to be the only person able to answer the phone in both
languages. I frequently didn't know the answer, but I frequently knew
how to find the person who did.
Some of the stories like how Black Peony got his new name, or why I
went swimming fully clothed Saturday night don't really bear retelling
in short form. Others like the 140kph ride on the back of one of the
motorcycles don't need more than a single sentence. Still others
are ones which I probably shouldn't be repeating.
Even cutting those out, there are a LOT of highlights. These are some
of the best of the best but this message is still really really REALLY
long.
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In Stage One (Haikou - Wenchang) I was riding in the convoy in the car
of one of the Assistant Race Directors'. What with it being car #3 I
was very excited, until I found out that car numbers had nothing to do
with where they were in the convoy. Numbers dealt more with whom was
in the car. And this car was taking up the tail end, behind the sweeps
bus even. The Radio Tour's sportscast and instructions to the team
cars was off so he could talk back and forth with people in other cars.
I was bored. Really bored. Couldn't see anyone other than stragglers
who'd been injured in the big crash at the beginning and was on a
decidely uninteresting piece of expressway at hardly 30kph.
Never wish for things to be more interesting.
Sometimes you might get what you wish for.
Because shortly after the three guys from Haima Team were swept from
the race and shortly after we got off the highway one of the South
African national team stopped his bike, said to his teammate "I don't
feel so good" and collapsed.
The professional medical translator was somewhere else up near the
front. I don't even like doing medical stuff in Chinese for _myself_
but, although there was another bilingual person in the general
vicinity that person felt my Chinese was better than his English in
this instance so I found myself in the back of the ambulance.
Occasionally my Chinese completely failed me and I couldn't ask or
answer the questions the medics had, other times they were things I
simply didn't want to be involved in knowing like the color or
frequency of this morning's bowel movements.
Additionally, I'm not a particularly good passenger, even less so when
speeding and riding sideways against the motion of the vehicle.
Somewhere around the second time he vomited I started getting violently
carsick myself.
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The morning of Stage Two I ate breakfast with the Mayor of Wenchang.
I'd actually had more than enough to eat at this point but I'd just
discovered that the flaky rolls next to the croissants were pain au
chocolat and was busily snarfing all of them when the vip table
invited me to sit with them. Chris (who tagged along for the first
three stages) knew the mayor from his days working at Hainan University
and the three of us sat over real coffee and real pastry talking in
English long past the time that the race involved vips had gone to
work.
Wenchang was also really nice because, of all the hotels we had, it was
the only one where we had Public Security Bureau guards posted at the
elevator on every floor. That and the portable satellite dish belonging
to CCTV set up in the back made the size of this whole thing feel
really Real for the first time. Before it actually started I had been
vaguely aware that it was a big thing but not really that it was that
big a thing and moreso one that I was actively involved with.
Even the marching bands and dragon dancers in the towns we passed
through, the crowds five deep and the total traffic gridlock in the
county hadn't impressed upon me how big a big thing this was in quite
the way that guards on every floor did.
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In Stage Two (Wenchang - Xinglong) I rode on the supply bus for the
feeding zone and got to see the peloton pass. The mussette bags weren't
made for these kinds of speeds and all the ones we saw get caught broke
and spilled on the ground.
What with the drizzle and the supply bus coming behind the sweeps bus
it was mostly me and Chris and Liu Zhengdong talking to the masseur
from Marco Polo Cycling, the guy from Trek, and a non-starting rider
from Ningxia Team.
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In Xinglong, in the morning, I got to meet the support for the United
Arab Emirates team because I was drooling on their spare bikes. Their
mechanic (I think, maybe masseur, anyways their English speaker who
wasn't the German coach) was unhappy with the poor quality of the
extras they'd been provided with. It was stingy of his government to
provide them with Campagnolo equipped titanium Colnagos with carbon
forks for spares. I told him that if he didn't want them he could
always give them to me, alas, he didn't agree.
One of the guys from the PLA team failed to get unclipped in time and
fell over in the parking lot because he was looking at the foreign girl
who was looking at his team's bikes.
I helped my shadow from the tv station do an interview with a
journalist who had come along with the Polygon Sweet Nice Team from
Indonesia. She'd speak Chinese. I'd speak English. The coach(?) would
speak Indonesian. He'd reply. The coach(?) would speak English. I'd
speak Chinese. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
I also had a short talk with the only English speaker there with Moscow
Omnibike Dynamo (one of the pro-continental teams involved). My Russian
has almost completely evaporated in the nine years since I took it in
high school but one of my jobs was to make sure athletes
didn't get lost between the awards ceremony and the press conference
and with his team and the team from Kazakhstan taking a lot of prizes I
wanted to know how to say "come here".
For Stage Three (Xinglong - Sanya) I switched to the sweeps bus and
finally got a good view of the race. At least until the last King of
the Mountains classification when two guys from the UAE team got badly
dropped and all we could see was them. They came in nearly ten minutes
behind the main field and when I found the stage the jerseys had
already been awarded and the press conference was already under way.
In Sanya I was interviewed by the Hainan Daily. The sports page the
next day had a sidebar article that was just about me.
I also got into a shouting argument in the lobby of the hotel with the
head of the Sanya Cycling Assosciation regarding the previous weekend's
amateur race. After loudly letting every Chinese speaker in the
vicinity know my opinion of women's third place prize cup in common
category when my time was nearly two minutes ahead of men's common I
suggested to him that perhaps we should go ask one of the international
commissaires, like maybe that guy from the Beijing Olympic Committee
(who I'd had lunch with the day before), his opinion about my recieving
only 800rmb of my 5000rmb in the prizes the posted rules said I should
get. For some inexplicable reason, the fellow from Sanya fled before
he could even be introduced.
I helped HNTV1 (my usual shadow being HNTV4) do an interview with the
South Africans on what they eat and got a cameo shot of myself sitting
on the floor of their hotel room.
Someone came up with the idea that the bikes should be stored outside
with military guards. The only team that actually went along with this
idea, however briefly, was the Chinese national team. I'd just met up
with a friend from Sanya and was walking back to the hotel when we got
to see the guards having an absolute fit as Unknown People first
crossed The Line, ignored their attempts to keep them from moving
forward, and then started -touching- The Bikes. I think the entire
street overheard Li Fuyu explaining at the soldiers that it might rain
so the bikes had to be removed indoors. The bikes were covered
with plastic and the skies were completely clear.
I went drinking with the masseur and the mechanic from Australia FRF
Couriers Excelpro (another pro-continental team).
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Stage Four (Sanya - Wuzhishan) started off with a 44 kilometer
criterium so I got to really see (and feel the wind of) the peloton
going by. I spent most of my time playing sportscaster for whoever I
was with at the time, since, although they were almost always other
bike friends, I'd been with the tour for a couple of days by this point
and actually knew which teams were which and who the riders were.
Actually had eaten meals with a number of the riders.
Got a major thrill out of deliberately walking on the wrong side of The
Line because I had a staff badge and I could.
Got involved in my own argument with the military which escalated to
one of them pulling my friend the sports photographer out of his gutter
crouch by the strap of his camera and escalated again to them calling
for one of the marshals to come deal with us. The marshal came, asked
what was wrong, snapped at the soldier who made the mistake of thinking
he
was the one being asked, and left. They didn't really bother us after
that.
Onto the bus. The UAE straggler from the day before eventually fell so
far behind we had to sweep him. Watching him had been so fascinating I
had fallen asleep. Got to use my magic English speaking abilities to
ask nicely if he wanted to get on the bus, and to eventually order him
on the bus when he wouldn't listen to the marshal (he pulled his number
off himself but he wouldn't stop riding and they wanted him on the bus
so they could open the road).
Later on when the version of events he told his coach didn't agree with
his being swept (he was just inside the 20km line but he was going
barely 15kph and they'd spent the last half hour making sure they had
permission to pick him up) the coach went for me instead of the team
translator to talk to the marshal in question and I got to answer
important questions without having to try for simultaneous translation
of seriously difficult concepts.
There were two random cyclists watching the race who weren't people I
knew! The driver briefly thought that they were part of the race and
had started to pull over to pick them up when he noticed that a) they
weren't injured b) one of them wasn't wearing the same colors as anyone
else in the field and c) they didn't have numbers.
I drank a rice wine toast with the vice-governor of Hainan at the
awards ceremony in Wuzhisan. And while I was babysitting the athletes
(who really didn't need watching, they'd gotten the don't wander away
meme by this point) had some kids ask for my signature.
Post lunch, while sitting with the Shimanos and some of Team China
heard from Li himself that he'll be leaving his current pro-continental
team (Marco Polo Cycling) in January to move up to Discovery Channel.
I saw bits and pieces of the bits and pieces of the crash involving one
of the Russians and his broken collarbone on tv.
I was woken up at 2:19 am by a phone call asking if I was aware that
the guard had noticed that my window was open and did I want it open at
night? Was I aware that it was unsafe? (As if that would normally be a
worry in the middle of nowhere Wuzhishan, it's less of an issue at a
resort hotel with security guards, and still less of an issue when the
perimeter also has guards from the PSB.)
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Stage Five (Wuzhishan - Danzhou) started with a King of the Mountains
rated at level one. I have no idea what that means in terms of
difficulty compared to mountains in really big races, but I do know
that Ertouling is 9.6 kilometers of the hardest [censored] of a mountain
on the island.
The PLA rider who was swept had crashed that morning and had an excuse
for flagging the bus. The rider from Qinghai Team had crashed so badly
the previous day that he was pulled well before the time limit due to
the ambulance noticing his wounds were bleeding again. The rider from
Ningxia Team had no excuse at all for taking 46 minutes to do
Ertouling. Haikou's best rider (who is in his late 30s) has done it in
33 minutes. The main field did it in something crazy like 25 minutes.
The UAE rider from the day before was back on our bus. When we caught
up to him he was waiting by the side of the road with one of the team
cars, having clearly spent the last unknown period of time being chewed
out. He left two hours ahead of the race so he could train without
permission of the coach.
The guy from Ningxia Team and another UAE rider were swept and bikes
had to start going on the equipment truck. We also had the photographer
from Holland, and Laobanniang from the Haikou bike shop on the bus with
us. We didn't have one of the two marshals originally assigned to the
bus as he was now on a motorcycle following an incident where a rider
from Haima had been drafting for a number of kilometers and hadn't been
prevented from doing it.
After consistently being no more than ten or fifteen seconds off of
first place in the General Individual Classification Li Fuyu lost over
eleven and a half minutes. My friends who got to watch bits on tv say
it is because his downhill speed wasn't good enough to get him into
the breakaway. The mechanic for Marco Polo Cycling said it was because
he was riding with Team China instead of his usual team. However,
although I'm not particularly good at reading results, I notice that
the only person from Marco Polo in the breakaway was the rider who is
going up to Rabobank (Thomas something-or-the-other).
Danzhou was nice. In terms of population I think Danzhou may be bigger
than Sanya so the crowds weren't merely big. They were huge. Lots of
kids running up to me to shake my hand.
Failing to find the person with food coupons and a knowledge of where I
was eating I walked to the western resteraunt for lunch. It was -very-
good but I was very tired of western and grateful to discover that my
dinner assignment was actually with the Chinese vips instead
of the foreign vips.
Jacky Lin from the provincial foreign affairs bureau came in around
10pm and stayed past 1am using the computer in my hotel room and
getting my help polishing the last vestiges of Chinglish out of the
speeches for the final awards ceremony.
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Too much of Stage Six (Danzhou - Haikou) was ridden on the expressway.
On the other hand, with five days of tv and newspaper coverage as well
as the full support of the government, people knew we were coming and
every single offramp had a large percentage of the population of every
nearby town out to watch the bikes pass.
The originally posted route back in September called for them to be
riding on the 225 national road. Having personally ridden the 225 more
than once the only way I can imagine this being done was if they were
going to repave it. I don't like going over 20kph on my relatively wide
tires on the 225. I can't imagine going their average 47kph on low
spoke wheels on the 225. Since there were a few places where I saw
fresh roadwork including asphalt covering the old railway tracks in
Sanya it is entirely possible they were planning to repave it and
didn't have the time.
It was raining coming into Haikou but the crowds were still appreciably
large for it being the western beach area in the drizzle. One of my
friends has acquired the first recumbent on Hainan island and I got to
ride that. I went around trying to bum Tour de Hainan water bottles
from teams and passed one of those and two Moscow bottles to friends.
My favorite bit was when one of the guys from Team Japan picked up a
bike and started to walk away with it. He'd been dropped from the rider
list on the first day and wasn't dressed the part. Since I'd been
talking to him before he walked away the cops asked me if it was
my bike. "No, that belongs to the Japanese national team. My bike is
over there." It wasn't deliberate cruelty on my part but I gave them a
split second to work up to full panic that Someone was Taking one of
the Bikes before telling them that he was a member of the Japanese
national team.
Unlike some of the riders (such as the one from UAE who was absolutely
flabbergasted that I use my bike as a method of transport and have gone
long distances without a team car following me) this particular rider
was first someone who liked cycling and then someone who was good
enough to be a member of his national team. He was letting people try
out his bike. Letting grubby handed strangers touch it and sit on it
and even try to ride it. Even let me take it over to the street and
ride it on proper pavement and told me I could go fast on it if I
wanted to.
I didn't want to.
I was scared by the hint of the merest possibility of breaking anything
on a Dura Ace equipped custom built carbon which he thinks cost maybe
$25,000 but isn't real sure since it was bought for him by his sponsor.
(I'm also not real sure since his English wasn't the best in the
world, but if you drop a 0 from 300,000 yen you only get $2500 and I
don't think this was that cheap.)
I took it up to perhaps 10kph and it was like flying on a frictionless
perpetual motion machine. The wheels just went round and round and
round forever. I only had to think of squeezing and the brakes stopped.
When the mechanic has been screwing around with my bike recently the
shifting feels responsive and crisp but that kind of crispness was a
soggy potato chip compared to this. I've been on friends' race bikes
before and if you could say that they had music in them then this one
had entire symphonies going on.
It was a very nice bike. I liked it.
The full-on awards ceremony with dinner and performances was held at
the New State Guesthouse which is one of those hotels that doesn't have
prices listed. One of those hotels which, quite possibly, might not
take people who walk in. We aren't talking mere five stars like the
Sheraton down the road, we're talking swank beyond swank. And I thought
the Noble Yacht Club (hotel #2) where I had the right to get a room
(but hadn't) was nice.
The person responsible for making sure that the extra prize jerseys
were safe helped me stea...errr...acquire a blue Best Asian Rider
Classification jersey which I got Li Fuyu to sign. He only took Best
Asian once during the tour but he's moving up to the big leagues and
even if the Japanese team turned out to be made up of lots of really
nice English speakers who gave me a water bottle that they all signed
they don't represent the country I live in.
All the other spare Tour of Hainan 2006 jerseys are going to go on
display. They were signed and have been handed out to various people of
importance. The bike shop was pleased to show me that they've got an
orange stage winner jersey and a polka dot king of the mountain jersey.
Not for sale of course.
But I've got a blue jersey and my jersey was signed by Li Fuyu and I'm
going to wear it (have worn it). Notwithstanding the general
twistedness of me wearing a Best Asian Classification jersey (which is
reason enough) it was signed by Li Fuyu and I've got a bad case of
sports star over him. One which the entire country is going to join me
in if he does as predicted and eventually becomes the first Chinese
rider in Le Tour de France.
I also helped the English speaker from Russia get in contact with the
bike shop manager over ordering 2000 custom water bottles for Moscow
Omnibike Dynamo. Their translator was frustrated that she'd spent the
last hour making phone calls trying to find the right person to call
and my first phone call was to the right person. I can only partially
claim responsibility for getting them together since the translator had
been about to call him (for phone call number seven) when I showed up.
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And if all those highlights weren't enough, the motorcycle corps has
told me if I want to I can come riding on the back of their 1300cc rice
rockets anytime I want, some guy from the foreign affairs bureau tells
me that there are international events in Hainan every month that could
be helped by having a native English speaker as a translator in the
office, and I've got more important people's contact information than I
know what to do with.
-M
