3. Describe your winning (or losing) move.
GUNNAR SHOGREN: Master’s Race-Get the hole-shot, put out enough effort to stay in front of the rest but not kill myself so I could do decent in the Elite race. Randy [Root] kept me pretty honest.
Elite Race-Greg [Wittwer] got the hole-shot and didn’t look back. Even if I heard he was “worried” about me. I really didn’t have any extra energy in that race. Would have been nice to though…
STEVE FIFE: The winning move came on the last lap. I was leading Andrew Troy and Jonathan Nisbet into the last lap. I wanted to be first through all of the sections because I felt that it was going to be hard to make a move from behind on such a technical course, and I didn’t want to get caught out if one of them went down. Turns out, I went down as I led into the long stair run up. My foot slipped as I planted it on the first step, and Troy was able to get a gap, while Nisbet was trailing after dropping his chain. Troy opened a gap of about 10 seconds, as I tried to close it down. He washed out on the steep turn onto pavement before the sand pit, and I thought I might be able to close it down. Troy quickly remounted, and finished ahead of me by six seconds as I ran out of room to close the gap. He rode very strong in the last part of the lap, so he totally deserved the win. My only wish was that it could have come down to a three-way battle to the line. I live for those moments in a cross race.
JAY MORALI: I had a crazy day…I really rode terribly when it came to technique…I ran into numerous barriers, dropped my chain once because of it, took bad lines and crashed once…However, I felt really strong and worked hard to get back into contention…it just goes to show you can do well with good fitness but you must master the technique to win!
JULIE KULIECZA: Coming in second to Betsy Shogren ain’t so bad, but my losing move had to have been taking the technical turns much slower.
LINDSAY BAYER: I was hanging onto the leader when we went up a short, steep hill. She ran it and I rode it, but I was distracted, lost momentum, and fell over. That cost me about five seconds. But the winning move would probably be catching up and passing to win.
CJ CONGROVE: I burned myself out pretty good on the first lap trying to get the prime, unfortunately I was second across the line at the first lap. Dropped back to about 7th or 8th on the second lap. Then I had a pretty spectacular upside-down crash in the sandpit but didn’t lose too much time, lotta sand in my mouth though which wasn’t awesome. It was actually the sandpit that got me into 5th place on the last lap though, the guy in front of me dismounted and ran it and I rode through it and got a bit of a gap on him going into the final stretch and was able to hold it to the line.
KENNETH MORRIS: Getting up from a crash in third to finish fourth.
NOAH BELL: I never gave up and didn’t let the guy behind me catch up.
JAKE THOMPSON: The thing that got me onto the podium this week was that I could go up the big hills and other people couldn’t.
