Look Ma, No Brakes

Look Ma, No Brakes was tonight, and even though my review is going to get a little scathing at points only 1% of it will be in criticism of Nadir and all the rad people who helped out with this awesome race. I should point out too that I’ve had a somewhat shit week leading up to tonight so take most of what I have to say with a healthy dose of salt. Those are the only caveats, however.

The race started a little late, perhaps a half hour–a totally normal occurrance for these things, and if you know Nadir it totally makes sense. He’s a great host no matter what though, coffee, music and a great environment are all to be expected. Given the fact that they also ran sprints in the morning (see Matt’s blog, Erin’s Flickr and here’s mine of just before the race started.) it totally could of been later, though I’m not complaining, some saw fit to though and we’ll get to that in just a second.

The race started with about 40 or so people, it was bull-run format around 90k, so right at the start we got our first checkpoint Jet Fuel, there was the usual chaos right off the bat, people in cars were pissed as it usually goes, I think someone got hit within 30 seconds of starting, but I took Bloor instead and bailed on the pack. I bumped into a lost Lenny and led him to the checkpoint. From there I kept on my own and rode down to the Leslie Split, through a gigantic puddle and up to the lighthouse where Nick Brown caught up to me, and we left, worst directions ever in hand down to the end of Queen St. and onto Rolling Brook which is a great hill, if you have an affinity for them. We found out there that we were about 20 min off the lead which was probably better than we expected, chatted a bit with the guys there and then were on our way to the Scarborough Bluffs where we got treated to Brimley Rd. Hill which is awesome to go down and hell to climb on a track bike. I’m not going to lie, we walked a good portion of that one.

Next it was back to the city to the corner of Yonge and Bay which given the lax rules on the race would have been best gotten to via the subway, from there we went to Dundas Square and then on to City Hall. This is where things went awry, there was no one at the checkpoint and only after riding around in circles for a few min we found the stack of chits with “Race is Over” written on them. A couple people caught up with us at this point so we all decided it best to ride to the next checkpoint to see if it was just a part of the race. We pulled up to the new Opera House at University and Queen where Chris (not the one I’m going to mention in a bit) was there to tell us that it had indeed been called. No one really knew at the time what was up, so we waited a bit for some people and headed back up to LC for the afterparty and some explanation. We were about 50k or so in at this point and were a little bummed that it was being called off. Fortunately no one got hurt and it wasn’t because of the police.

We hung out at LC for a bit and ate some delicious food that Nadir hooked up, there was a dancing man dancing his heart out, but mostly we just speculated on what happened. Finally Nadir called all the racers out to the back where he apologize profusely for a screw up at one of the checkpoints. He offered a couple solutions to how things transpired.

1: he was willing to refund everyone’s entry fee, and double it ($40).

or,

2: he would give anyone wanting to do it a chance to race to one checkpoint and back, winner takes all ($3000).

Fortunately someone threw out another option, seeing as the person who “won” half of the race was making sure that there was no doubt that everyone knew what “fucking bullshit” the race was, his friend decided to point out that he should just get the purse and that was that. After all, there was no way that anyone could have possibly caught him, he’s immune to flat tires, crashes or random acts of getting lost. He’s lucky his friend stuck up for him seeing as most of his argument included sulking and “what the fuuuck”ing around like toddler that just had his blankie taken away. Only problem is that dude, you’re a fucking adult.

There were thoughts of giving him half and giving half back in the form of refunds or better yet, charity. Probably a moment to show some grace and tact, but as it goes: no such luck, though what would you expect at this point, he’d let everyone know that he’d been “couriering a long time, man…” So after a few minutes of Nadir sweating and everyone feeling fairly awkward, friend pipes up again emploring everyone to “be the bigger man, and give it to the winner” “can anyone argue with that?” well, of course no one would and even though people had been up until that point, by then it was moot.

Baby get soother or baby cry.

Feelings of disgust toward a someone this pathetically self-absorbed can be mistaken for apathy or even worse, mistaken as people being in agreeance with the situation at hand. I can assure you that very few people were much more than completely exasperated by the debacle, and if it wasn’t enough, the sulking went on when Nadir gave you the win you had so desperately fought for (I can’t wait to see those pictures). If that wasn’t enough though, you left post haste on your bike to go home, no hangouts with the people who had unanimously voted you the winner, sort of selfish. If the response to “Three Cheers For Chris” didn’t indicate the collective feeling within that crowd, maybe a “fuck off” or 100 would have. Those were saved till after you left though.

Now, for more caveats (I know I said I was done with these): I had no chance or intention of winning this race, it was $20 well spent considering I got to ride with friends, make some new ones and see parts of Toronto I haven’t seen in a while. I also don’t have any sort of beef with the guy in question, I just think it was a really unsavoury way to handle things. People worked hard on the race and even though there shouldn’t be there are bound to be fuckups, and as one person said “Sometimes you have to wait around for a receptionist, you have to use your messenger skills man” fuckups do happen, and either you roll with them or not. Calling a whole race off on behalf of one person is a bit much though. That $20 dollars though probably would have been better spent on the homeless than going in the pocket of some whiny unappreciative bitch who could barely form a sentence to give one good reason why he deserved it.

All that aside it was a lot of fun, cold, sadistic and wet, but very fun. The lasagna and potato’s were great, people were friendly and everyone seemed to have a good time. Thanks to Nadir and Redbull and Inquiring Mind and all the people who made it happen. The Stash and Futura bikes look way better in person than on the web, go check them out.

/rant+shit week

see you when I’m back from nyc.