bitingduck

Yeah, I knew it was (I saw the reg list when I was thinking about registering) and decided I could call the top 5 (I had a different order-- my money was on Creed, but Curtis is probably more experienced tactically). I would have put Cody in 2nd (last name Oreilly-- he's Rory's son). Was 2nd place Brad Huff? I think Creed had two reg's in his name, and one was for Huff. I'd actually pick him over Mike, and I'm pretty sure he wasn't in Beijing this weekend.

60 miles is a *long* track race solo. As a madison it would be a little less bad. Short of a 6-day style race, the longest you're likely to ever see is the 200 lap madison at worlds (they only run 160 laps at world cup). Even modern 6-days don't usually have chases that go for more than an hour, though we keep talkng about having a 24-hour madison with teams of 3 people. I had heard they were going to allow a feed on the backstretch at around the halfway point, but camelbacks sounds better-- the transition to the apron there is pretty gnarly, and the feed zone could have gotten ugly.

I didn't ride because I could already pick 5 people who could reliably finish in front of me, and the price was kind of steep to spend 60 miles on encino. I think the reason only 5 finished is that they were running it as a modified miss & out, with 5 riders getting pulled every 50 laps. That could have supported ~40 starters, but that track is too narrow to race more than about 25-30 safely.