A couple of weeks ago I spoke to a Belgian journalist and he was joking how pathetic the American races were, with their low spectator numbers. Which might be true, they are probably below the attendance of most Belgian races, but what never happens in the US is that on most parts of the course, the top female riders rode in complete silence. Something felt off and it took me a while to figure out what. I just saw Lucinda Brand and the rest of the top ten racing through a double bend and the 30-40 people standing there did not do anything. I thought, maybe because they were all Dutch, but there were maybe 2-3 people who offered some encouragement to Sanne Cant when she got to those corners. What’s fun about the American races (and to be fair to most races outside of the Benelux countries) is that they cheer loud and they cheer for everybody. So yeah, I’d take an Iowa City crowd instead of a Merksplas crowd any day.
The other fun thing today was the death of the shutter of one of my cameras. It was one of those comedy moments, when pulled up the camera to my eyes and it just started to omit this weird noise and then concluded that it has an Error-20 and would not work any longer. Luckly, Yefri saw my misfortune on Instagram and offered a backup for tomorrow’s race, so all is not lost. I’ve been thinking about switching to Sony for a while, maybe this was the last straw?
