Down To Business
Friday 7.10
On Friday I eventually got out of National after almost missing my flight because of more inept people at the check-in desk. It took a bit of arguing to keep from being charged extra for bringing my bike (which I hoped to sell in Austria since I’m scraping for money from all this travel).
Just over the boarder of Germany and Austria, slightly South of a town named Bad Ischel there is a stretch of valley that follows a stream towards a town named Bad Goisern. The mountains here are abrupt and dramatic which seemed appropriate since this is where the end of the film would play out. After 6 months of traveling almost every weekend to dozens of races, riding each like it was their last, the woman’s Olympic slot was going to be decided. There was only 41 points between Mary and Sue, Mary having the lead. First place for this race, the Marathon World Championships (Marathon is a distance race, and in this case it was going to be 106 km), is 200 points and a riders as far back as 70th place could score points. If both finished, Sue would have to break the top 10 and have Mary fall back into the 20’s to take the slot. But this is mountain bike racing and anything is possible. Either Sue or Mary could have a mechanical, suffer a crash or injury preventing them from finishing and the other would walk away with the slot as long as they finished the race.
The land is the most spectacular I have ever seen. The houses the most picturesque and the women, who seemed to outnumber the men 2 to 1 - the most stunning.
After scoring a nice mini-van at the Munich airport, I drove South and picked up Jeremiah Bishop at the Salzburg airport. He flew in with Sue who had a van waiting. Sue was told her bike was not on the flight but the airline would deliver it to her hotel at the race site - of all races to not need additional stress, this was it. One thing Sue did have locked up was a perfect place to stay - within walking distance to the venue. Just outside Sue’s window was Mary and Mikes RV parked in a field. JB and I checked the town for places to stay and ended up at a hotel about 20k away at the base of a small ski hill. The price included dinner and breakfast so it wasn’t a bad deal for €45 a night. At dinner we were joined by Andrew Juskaitis, a reporter/technical editor for Velo News magazine. I had never met Andrew but he had a dry sense of humor, tends to be pretty sarcastic and looks like a bleached-blonde cross between Dolph Lundgren and Sting. He chatted with us as we put our bikes together in the basement.
