Just thought I'd share with you a re-cap,
straight from the horses mouth.
With the Bethel Masters Class crown up for grabs
in the last race of the season
Joe Straub needed just one more win to ice the title.
Several other riders were in the same position, that is to say a win
would get them the title and deny Joe his brag.
The race started cautiously but fast. Twenty
minutes into the race Joe broke away with several other riders. The
breakaway fizzled out, despite Joe begging in vain for the others in
the breakaway to work as a team, and the peloton hunted them down.
With two laps left Joe dug deep; and, with another rider, he
accomplished another breakaway. But after establishing a gap that
Joe thought they could well maintain, Joe was shocked to find that
he had been had. The other rider sat up and stopped working, and the
chase group began creeping up to catch them once again.
Joe was now left out by himself with the peloton
bearing down on him. However, with the race on the line, as well as
the title, Joe once again dug deep. When the peloton overtook him,
he took a brief break to gather his wits. He had just decided all
was not lost, because he was still within striking distance of the
leaders. Then disaster struck! Some "asshole," as Joe describes him,
tried to pass between Joe and the curb on his right, with only 12"
of clearance.
Of course, the "asshole" hit the curb then
careened into Joe's handlebars. From that point on, as Joe
describes it, "it was like a game of pin ball...", with Joe being the ball
bouncing off the riders around him. First he hit the rider to his left,
then bounced back into the asshole on his left. Eventually, with all
his upright bouncing and rebounding duties out of the way, Joe
finally went down for a couple more courtesy bounces across the
pavement.
Close to the end of it, Joe had become sure that
somebody was going to go down, and he was also sure that he did not
want to see it, so he just closed his eyes. When he opened them back
up, he noted that no bones were broken (a big improvement over past
performances), so he got up off the ground and finished the race.
Good thing he closed his eyes and missed how
frightful the crash was. If he'd seen it, he'd have decided to take
a DNF, and we wouldn't have much of a story here.
Yours in cycling.
Palletman