Dartmouth Cycling Wiki | Races / Boston Beanpot 2007

Dartmouth Alum Chris Harris '80 was on hand Sunday and took some exciting pictures. Check them out at: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8MbM27Vk1akQ&notag=1

Kevin Wolfson's Race Report:

Lots of action this past weekend at Beanpot, so I'll do my best to report what I know without being too long-winded.

The weekend started with the TTT early on saturday morning. 9.6 mile course with a few rollers and some right turns. Good pavement, good course. Thanks to the more than 20 riders that made it to Beanpot, Dartmouth had teams in every category, which was fantastic. The women's A team of Jen, Jenna, and Courtney Calise rode well, especially for their first TTT together, and scored bunches of points with a 5th place finish. The men's A TTT went better than expected, and we finished in 2nd place just 6 seconds off of Princeton's time despite me getting gapped once (twice?) for a few seconds and Saunders breaking his crank. Power.

Next came the road race around a 13 mile loop that largely overlapped with the TT course plus another hill. Chris Carey took a dominating win in the men's E race (upgrade?), and Brian Guerzio scored a great 9th in the men's D race. Jen started the women's A race hoping to improve on her 6th place last weekend by making the break, and she did just that by making the final selection of 5 (or 6) and finishing a fantastic 3rd place (beating Lipton pro Kim Geist and earning her the nickname "pro-killer").

The men's A race was 6 laps long and pretty packed with action. Rudy got off the front in the first lap with a few other guys and stayed away for 3 laps. Two laps in, and largely a result of Dartmouth riders' efforts, a group of 15ish guys including Saunders, Toby, Pech, and myself split from everyone else. We rotated through pretty quickly for a lap and a half or so to separate ourselves from the field and caught Rudy and Ryan Kelly after the 3rd time up the climb. At that point, we had 5 out of 15 riders and were doing perfectly. Then the group slowed down. We all assumed the rest of the race was well behind us, so there was no point in driving it and we decided that it would be wise to wait a lap or so to start really attacking the group. Unfortunately, we hesitated too much and the remaining field of 20-30 came back to us early in the 5th lap. We went from 5/15 to 6 (with Rossman) out of 40ish. Woops. Next time up the hill we set a hard tempo to try to break it up some, and the group shrank a bit, with Rossman making the split this time and Rudy dropping off after his earlier efforts. On the last lap, Jamey Driscoll (UVM) attacked, and fortunately Pech made a move to bridge to Jamey and made it there with Peter Horn's (Vassar) help. That break stuck, and Toby led out the sprint giving Dartmouth 3rd (Pech), 6th (Saunders), 7th (meself), 10th (Rossman), and 12th (Toby). Meaning we scored a lot of points despite our mid-race mistakes.

Ok, onto the crit. Awesome course. Maybe not ideal for the intro fields since it's so technical and the straight-aways alone took out several men's E riders and scared coach Toddy out of the race, but unbelievably fun if you can let go. If you haven't seen a race on that course, every one goes the same. In the first 5 laps, half the field is dropped usually because of people leaving gaps in corners. Several Dartmouth riders did go down, although none were seriously hurt. Example: Darrell raced an awesome and aggressive race and was in a great spot with just a few to go but fell victim to the course.

Jen again proved her strength as the women's A team leader (and her improvement over last year) by sticking to every split during her race and sprinting to a great 6th place. It looks like she'll keep on improving and one of these days the chips will fall her way for real.

The men's A race was probably the best race we've had all year in terms of executing our plan. The goal was to put me in the point jersey by the end of the day, meaning any break had to have me in it, and then set Saunders up for the sprint. We started with 5 guys as Toby did Marblehead with Fiordifrutta earlier in the day. First lap, I followed Jason Sears (MIT) when he attacked out of the second corner. I noticed we had a gap, so I pulled us through the lap. Second lap after the second corner Nick Frey caught us, went to the front, and dropped Jason, putting me and Nick out front with 38 laps to go. Behind us the field was shattering and all of our riders made the split and worked to set tempo and cover moves. A crash took Rossman out of the race midway through, but fortunately he wasn't hurt. Nick did most of the work for the first half of the race until I found a rythm, and then we went pull for pull until the end and almost lapped the field before Nick plain dropped me on the hill before the last corner. Being in a break all day was amazing. I had put on new Vredestein tires before the start and we were ripping the corners like you can't do in the field. Good stuff. Saunders rounded out the podium with a dominating sprint for 3rd, and Rudy and Pech both scored points as well. Big mistake of the day: not knowing how close Nick was in the points competition. I now trail him by 2 points and got neither the sweet Beanpot jersey nor the sprint jersey this week. Oh well, I won't make that mistake again.

In the end we had a great weekend of racing that saw Dartmouth finish second for the weekend and move up in almost every category (highlighted by Saunders' 4th overall in the Men's A standings). Another weekend, more improvement. UVM is next weekend. Hopefully we can get another big group and more good results

Pictures are on their way!