cycling utah March 2000
By Darin Boyd
The weekend of February 25th through the 27th marked the first race of the USCF National racing calendar, with Another Dam Race in Parker Arizona. The popular race featured 3 stages for the Pro, 1-2 fields for both the men and women and 2 stages for all other categories. Friday was just for the serious folks and gave them a great chance to break things up with a 11 mile hill climb featuring sections of up to 13% grade. Saturday saw all classes at La Paz State Park for a 1.2 mile Criterium course, and Sunday was a road race on the 33 mile loop up and over Parker Dam.
Several local Utah and Idaho racers made the trek to enjoy the horrible days in the mid 70's under sunny skies and almost no wind. The mix was in almost all categories from Dave Zabriskie riding for his new 7up/Colorado Cyclist team along with Ryan Littlefield and John Osguthorpe from Rhodes in the Pro,1-2 field, to David Blanco in the Juniors race. Andrea Foster now riding for 800.com and Alison Bergeson with Goldy's were active in the tough Pro 1-3 women's field with all but 2 Pro teams represented. The best finish by a local rider was from Tim Brown (X-Men) who finished 5th in the Cat 2 race, he was joined by Billy Allen (Rhodes) and Steve Smock and Mike Peterson (Utah Premier) who all finished in the tough 90 odd rider field. Nate Page rode his first Cat 3 race and finished with the field, while J.R. Smith and Richard Blanco had good races in a huge masters field. Keith Anderson and myself rode in the Cat 4 field of around 80 riders and I was able to take 6th in the RR which moved me to 10th in GC. Dirk Cowley and Jill Smith rode in their respective 35+ masters classed with Dirk racing down a class just because he is such a stud.
The race was a fun and well organized, and all went well until the photo finish camera did a less than stellar job of capturing the finishers of the RR on Sun. This made it take 5 hours for me to get my results and several people were still waiting as I left for Vegas. Just goes to show that not only us local officials can have a hard time getting a race scored, so lets all try and be patient.
See ya on the road!