I couldn’t get enough of the ATOC, so I made the trek to LA (oh, and visited dad while I was down here … nice excuse, eh?).
Now this time trial is right in the belly of LA … starts right by the Staples Center, goes by the Coliseum, passes through City Hall …. basically it is shutting down LA, the third largest city in America. This is huge, and I had to be a part of this.
Not wanting to deal with traffic and hassles of getting around downtown, I decided to take Metro Rail from South Pasadena. I had never taken Metro Rail before, so this should be interesting. I went with my friends Mary and Joe, and we took the Gold line, transferred to the Red Line, then a short hop on the Blue line, and it dropped us right at the start of the time trial. It wasn’t quite as bad as I thought … in fact, it was pretty smooth. I’m going out on a limb, and saying it is even smoother than taking BART into downtown SF … ok, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea … taking the train to LA is a nice alternative. For those in LA, wanting to get to downtown, try Metro Rail as an alternative.
It’s a good thing I didn’t decide to take my bike on Metro Rail … there was little room to manuever and many times, had to carry the bike up and down stairs, just to get around.
Ok, onto the festivities of the time trial. First, we gotta do the usual, like searching for free schwag at the festival. The usuals were out there … Livestrong, Radio Shack, Garmin, BMC … all the big teams with big booths. What was surprising at this year’s TofC was no giveaway cowbells, no free Livestrong chalk.
It’s just another excuse to try finding goodies, oogle at some of the fully decked out bikes, and just wasting time before the actual event transpired.
We ended up just around the corner from Flower and 11th Street. Since we had spent quite a bit of time at the festival, the crowd gathered finding their spots, while we were still looking for schwag. Eventually, we did find a spot that didn’t have too many obstructions, and we also found a shade … that’s good and bad … good that we wouldn’t get sunburned … bad, in that later in the day, shadows would creep across, causing some havoc with exposure on our pics.
It turned out we were situated where we would see the riders twice each lap … and since the time trial ran for two laps, we get to see each rider 4 times. This provided some challenges in taking action shots as the passed by in front of us. The better shot was when they came across the other side.
I found when trying to shoot the riders passing in front of me, it tested my skills of panning with the rider. For the fast TT riders, like Fabian Cancellara or Dave Zabriskie, it meant having the picture not completely framed the right way.
There was a bit of an anxious moment, about a quarter of the way through the field. One of the moto’s took the turn a little too fast, and couldn’t negotiate the right turn, and proceeded to crash into the center dividing barrier. The rider after the moto managed to just avoid the obstacle just in time. They were able to get the barrier back in place before the rider on the other side came through. Kudos to the tour folks for acting quickly, so that none of the competitors were affected by this. This was way before the GC contenders were scheduled, and this was not covered on Versus. Lucky for the moto.
All in all, I’d say the time trial in downtown LA was a success. Whether or not they will do it again, that remains to be seen. Initial reports from the LAPD was very favorable, in the way it was organized and the way it was controlled. If it was held in downtown again, I’d come back for it. Getting in and out of downtown was very smooth via Metro Rail.
We later went to the team buses to see if we could get some free schwag. Some got lucky, but not me. I guess I’m not persistent enough. I was able to get a shot of Levi as he was leaving the team bus. I could tell he was not in the mood to sign, but he was gracious enough to take some time to sign a few autographs.
We also hovered around the Columbia-HTC truck, with hopes of seeing Michael Rogers (they had a big camera set up for a possible interview). However, we didn’t hang around long enough for him to show. Instead, I took some bike porn pictures … nice, eh?
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