One week in Winter Park, Colorado (2019 USAC Mountain Bike National Championships)

Huge fields of almost 150 riders at nats

Why is it that my blog hardly ever gets updated in "real time"? Why is there always a week in between some memorable experience and the time I finally sit down and write about it? Is it maybe a need for me to digest the experience? Or is it the fact that once I get home there's so much stuff to do, things such as laundry, shopping, cleaning and riding bikes, making more airline reservations, answering e-mails and sifting through the snail mail that my man Ysidro deposits in the mailbox on the specified date, writing the occasional post-event report and finishing paperwork when my travel was "business"-related, calling friends that I have neglected for much longer than I would like, and trying to work on that ever-growing mountain of  recent issues of VeloNews, Car & Driver, Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Bicycle Retailer & Industry News?

Initial course inspection of the Pro downhill course--what's missing here?

Or could it just be that after working 103 officially clocked hours in eight days I'm just simply too exhausted to sit down and write blog post number 320?

Keeping your feet blister-free is part of the challenge--liner toe socks from injinji work for me

Looking back on this most recent trip, which took me to one of Colorado's most beautiful ski resorts, Winter Park, I think that it was truly the physical and mental toll that this huge event took on me that required some downtime afterward. For the fourth time in five years, USA Cycling had entrusted me with the leadership duties of our elite mountain bike championships, an event that--as far as I know--is the largest national championship that is being organized by USAC. For this year, we had more than 1,550 individual racers, most of whom competed in at least two disciplines, if not more. When I worked the race in Mammoth a few years back, we had about 1,200 individual racers.

The mountain guys at work, improving our start ramp for the DH

Top of the Pro DH on race day

USAC's mountain bike nats award Stars and Stripes jerseys to our elite racers (yes, the ones who compete in World Cups, World Championships, and the Olympics) in five disciplines: Downhill and Dual Slalom on the gravity side, Crosscountry and Short Track on the endurance side, and the beautifully all-encompassing Enduro, which really goes back to the roots of the mountain bike era and has a bit of everything--and which has grown exponentially in the past few years and claims an international series of its own, the EWS (Enduro World Series). But this is not just about the elite racers, the ones whom most of you would call "Pro" racers (whether they can actually make a living or not is not the defining criterion). Our national championships award age group medals to competitors as young as six years of age, and in some disciplines we have a 80+ category. And everyone who podiums--regardless of age--is in my view a true champion, and those who "merely" participate are heroes, too. Nationals podiums go five deep for "amateur" racers, and that's a good thing. Yep, years back I medaled, too.

I flew up to Colorado Springs two Saturdays ago and was picked up by my old (no, young!) friend Justin, who once was one of my apprentices and who is now the youngest International Commissaire at the UCI (if you discount the one European whose specialty is Indoor Cycling, an obscure aberration of the sport that is a distant relative of synchronized swimming and is really big in places such as the Czech Republic). Anyhow, Justin is also the guy who is responsible for more things having to do with US mountain biking than you would think one 27-year-old could handle. Without him, USAC would have to scramble, hard. Justin picked me up from the airport and I stayed with him and his wife, Morgan, in their nice CO Springs home for that night. Needless to say that we demolished a few beers that evening.

Justin driving the yellow box-truck

Sunday morning we drove up to Winter Park. Plans were changed a bit in that I drove Justin's car while he had to pilot a rented box-truck that contained some last-minute additions to the race infrastructure. Thanks to some crazy traffic and a one-hour accident-related standstill in Denver we made it to Winter Park with just enough time for me to preview the Pro Downhill course, on foot. The best racers will take a little less than six minutes to scream down the steep mountain side--it took me almost two hours (with frequent stops during which I gave feedback to Devin, the WP dude in charge of the course, in regard to issues with the course) to walk the 2.5 miles. After that came meetings with the timing crew, and more importantly, with Tara, who is USAC's lynchpin in making these races happen. Justin and I hit the local Safeway and the liquor store just before closing, and at 22:20 hrs we sat down in my condo for a hastily prepared yet pretty damn yummy dinner.

And thus we set the stage for the event, with a change in plans, a long day, and improvisations.

The mountain guys planning Enduro deployment strategy--these guys rock!

When I wrote earlier that "USAC entrusted me" with leading this event, it was in full appreciation of the fact that some people at our national governing body for the sport of Cycling think that I can lead a crew for an event of this magnitude. It is an honor to be called upon to be in charge of the officials for what boils down to be the equivalent of football's Superbowl. We have quite a few extremely  experienced, talented, and dedicated referees in the US, and I know most of them and feel privileged to have worked with and learned from them. The nine officials who were assigned to this event, to be led by me, are all in their own right accomplished commissaires. OK, some of our less experienced refs on the crew might not have been able to step in cold-turkey, but there were at least five officials who could do the same job as I did, or so I think after having worked with all of them on numerous occasions. They are, to use an analogy from the field of music, accomplished virtuosi on various instruments--but USAC brings me in to elevate these individual players to form an ensemble that will knock off your socks, without egos and without theatrics. I can't tell you how incredible it feels to be the director of such an orchestra. It's simply humbling.

Officially, the championships started on Monday with packet pick-up and onsite registration, practice sessions, and our first riders' meetings. Tuesday brought our first qualifying events and finals, and this kept going until Sunday afternoon. I had worked well ahead of the event on assigning my commissaires to the various positions that need to be covered--an extremely complex task that took me days to accomplish ahead of the event and required daily fine-tuning and adjustments during race week. For Thursday, the day of the 8-stage Enduro, we actually had to call in extra officials as otherwise we could not have handled sixteen distinct starts and finishes for more than 150 racers, all in separate locations all over the mountain. It was a logistic nightmare that definitely required some out-of-the-box thinking. With everyone's help and efforts we got the job done, and we actually smelled like roses when our officials' scoring saved the day when the timing company's electronic systems experienced some hick-ups. Dude, that evening I felt a big weight lifted off my shoulders.

Scenes from the Cross Country and Dual Slalom

That feeling didn't last long. On Friday the schedule called for three concurrent finals in three disciplines, in three different locations. Do the math: Our temporary officials were all gone (except an old friend from Texas who used to be an official but had not renewed her license in a few years--Justin and I were able to fast-track her renewal and Christine worked alongside the other officials for the final three days of the event). You need to understand that as Chief Referee I cannot assign myself to a particular position as there are always issues that arise that I have to deal with--and you can't do that when you're the starter or finish judge of a race. That Friday was by far the most complex day of racing that I have ever experienced.

A few shots of my crew in action

The days were long, all of them. Most of the time we'd have a meeting at 7 a.m. to make sure that we all understood what everyone's assignments were; at that point, Leslie, our secretary commissaire, would have already been on the job for an hour or so to make sure that everyone had start lists for the day's event. When I'd leave at 8:30 or 9:30 p.m., Leslie would still be helping the timing crew massage the results. She had even more overtime hours than I did. On a few mornings we met at 6:30 a.m., with some of the first racing starting at 7:10 a.m! Needless to say, there was not much nightlife in us after these exhausting days. I enjoyed dinner in a resort restaurant twice--the rest of the time dinner consisted of something to wolf down in the condo. No complaints here as my condo mate was my old buddy Scott from Honolulu (I had seen him last in late 2017 when I had gone to Hawaii for a week of R&R and stayed for a couple of nights at his place). We'd knock back a couple of beers, talk about the just-finished day and preview what was to come, and then we crashed. It wasn't until the last night that I didn't wake up at 4 a.m., thinking of something that I had either forgotten or that I needed to pay special attention to. Leslie told me about her middle-of-the-night sweat attacks, and I can't imagine how Tara managed this week.

Nutty fan at the top, and my good friends Suzanne and Fred Schmidt
from Waco--Fred in the 80+ XC race

So, you might think that this is just a damn stressful job for a retired dude. Why subject myself to sleep deprivation and nightmares? Well, officiating at this level is a bit addictive. It's not a power thing, at least not for me--it's more about the satisfaction to bring out the very best in the people who are looking to me for leadership. It is taking great pride in making the race as positive as possible for all those athletes as well as their supporters. It's about working with the mountain guys, the medics, the timing crew, the announcers, the vendors, the grandparent who has come out to watch her granddaughter race but doesn't know how and where and when to catch a glimpse of her. It's about seeing old friends and acquaintances from all over the country whom I have know forever (and who always know my name even if I can't recall theirs). It's about having untold people stopping me and saying, "Jürgen, you are putting on a great event" and then responding, "No, it's all those other people who are doing it--I'm just happy to be here and make sure that we don't have too much mayhem." And man, if that's not addictive, I don't know what is.

Thank you, USA Cycling, for giving me these once-in-a lifetime opportunities. And to all my crew and everyone else involved: Thank you for making me look good! 

Jürgen

PS: And here are a few movie clips: