Racing: Day 1 Track

Wow, where to start. First what a night I had last night. At the opening ceremony, I took a bag from Tyler, our team manager. Well it ends up that I forgot the bag at the ceremony. That was quite the smooth move because in the bag were all our team’s bibs. Well, a few hours later around midnight, Tyler and I found ourselves digging through garbage bins trying to find the numbers.


Tyler and I were really excited when our numbers turned up this morning. It ends up that the skaters from Portugal picked them up and gave the bibs to the officials.


It’s quite hot and shade is hard to come by. Skaters were even trying to find shade under the giant floating balloons and banners.


Jesse Pauley (in red to the right of the USA skater) put together a great 15km elimination race. He finished top-20 and avoided some pretty crazy crashes that saw dozens of skaters go down at a time. There was also some pretty intense falls in the senior women’s race where again, about 15 skaters went down at once. Sigrid Ziegler was one of the victims of a fall in the 2nd lap of her 15k.

The junior women’s race was just awesome to watch. With about 11 laps to go, a skaters from Korea just took off. At that point, it was like the pack exploded! I just looked like 12 skaters skating a time trial on the track. The Korean was caught by Chile’s Catherine Penan who also looked like she was out of gas. Then two Colombian skaters went after for 1st, but one of them ended up 2nd and the other dropped out.


USA controlled the front of the men’s 15k elimination race. Joey Mantia won the race passing the two Colombian skaters with 100-meter to go. Colombia placed 2nd and 3rd.


The vendor’s area is usually bustling with people. There’s food, equipment vendors, tables, an internet café, souvenir tents.


Colombia’s Berenice Moreno after her senior women’s 300-meter victory. New Zealand’s Kalon Dobbon won the men’s race, just missing breaking 25 seconds. 2nd was USA’s Joey Mantia and 3rd Italy’s Gergory Duggento. There was no crashes in the senior men’s race and racing was quite calm with not a lot of change of positions in the top-6 or 7.


While I was watching some of the races, I kept my eyes on the referees. Things were quite serious, but they were also able to have fun. These two referees came to see someone on the sidelines right after the finish line. The referee who rings the bell rang it. The referees on the track thought a skater was coming and scampered off the track in a panic that they clearly did not want to advertise. They obviously laughed it off afterwards.

Guido Ferra is putting up live results on PatinCarera. He’s updating his website from track-side. They’ve got a press section with internet connections! I wish I had that last year.