Story: 1980 Davis Criterium

I arrived at the 1980 Davis Criterium as a recent upgrade to category two and impressed by my newly found competition, but also confident that I had a slight chance of doing fairly well because the course was perfect for me. Until the early 1980s, the Davis Criterium course was a perfect half mile rectangle, much of which is covered by wonderfully large trees. Its last three turns are used by the course of today as its first three turns.

The weather was quite a few degrees above perfect, and I had a nice warm up. Fellow club member Heidi Hopkins won the women's race by a wide margin, and I watched my buddy Casey Kerrigan place in the junior race amongst some other sprinter types who looked more like football players. As I lined up for my race, my front tire went flat about thirty seconds before the start. Fortunately, Casey was there in a flash with the front wheel off of his bike, and I was able to start with only a small amount of excess adrenalin. I noticed that the referee's stand had been placed such that they were in the sun all day long, and was glad that I had not chosen such a career path.

The eighty lap, forty mile race was smooth and uneventful until the halfway point when there was a huge crash close to the start/finish line. I was baffled to see riders come from behind me only to plunge into the maze of bodies, and others come to a complete stop only to find that they could not balance while motionless and then fall over. When it appeared that a stable equilibrium had been reached (the rate of fallen riders getting up having reached the rate of new riders going into the pile), I threaded my way to the sidewalk and rode around the mess, and then worked with a few others to get back to what was now a smaller pack.

After resting at the back of the pack for a few laps, I decided that I did not want to end up stuck behind another wreck, so I slowly picked my way up to the front of the pack. To my surprise, riding at or near the front of this pack was really no more difficult than sitting near the back of the pack. I felt very well rested, and decided that if any good riders attempted to breakaway from the pack that I would go with them. I waited and waited, but nobody made a decisive move.

With fifteen laps to go, I noticed that Mike Bunds, a very capable time trialist, had decided to stick right behind me. A couple of laps later, I ended up right at the front as we came through turn two, and then I heard a large crash behind me. Knowing that Mike Bunds was glued to my rear wheel and that many folks would be stuck behind the crash, I accelerated smoothly for the entire length of the back stretch. We were really moving when I pulled off going into turn three, and Mike came through like a train on fire with Jim Rogers (the district time trial champion) and two other guys on board. We had just put a large amount of daylight between us and the pack.

Every man in the group took a good hard turn at the front. After taking my turn and pulling off, I saw that we now had a huge lead on the pack. The five of us worked together like a well-oiled machine, heaping several seconds on our lead every lap. The promoter of the race attempted to introduce entropy into our group by having several very generous primes, but we never missed a beat, working together to rake in the cash in the process.

Then an even more exciting thing happened: as I took my pull through turn two with three laps to go, I saw the back one-third of the pack entering turn three. Not only did that further excite me, it stirred the others as well, each of whom selflessly turned up the heat during their turn at the front. To the surprise (and dismay) of the referees, we caught the back of the pack with about one-third of a lap to go. Our final sprint was to be through the pack!

Remarkably, each of the five of us knew the whereabouts of our nearest cohort during the sprint. After we finished, we regrouped, congratulated and thanked each other, we found that each of us had exactly the same version of the sprint and that we were all in complete agreement regarding our finishing order (though I must admit that I had to be convinced that I was 2nd and not third). We knew that the referees would be having a tough time of it, and when we rode over to them, they were very upset with themselves because they had only seen one of the five of us sprinting through the mass of some seventy-odd riders, an impossible mess to sort out in the days before affordable and portable video cameras. Boy, did we make their day by giving them the goods!

When all was said and done, Jim Rogers had won, I had taken second, John Porcella was third, with Mike Bunds in fourth. Wow, what a day! It was with glee that I bought lunch for my buddies at a Stuckey's on the way home as I swelled with newly found confidence about my ability to perform as a category two rider. I had even finished ahead of all but one of the several category one riders in the race!