Team Member: Katie June

Race Name: Acworth Women’s Sprint

Race Date: August 8, 2010

Race Placement/Time/Qualification: 1st AG/I guess 5th overall

Tell us about your race (limit 500 words)…: I wasn’t very thrilled with many aspects of this race. I was in the very last swim wave, so I had to pass quite a few people, even some who had started 3 waves ahead of me. Once I got on my bike I realized that I wasn’t going to have a very fast split. This was mainly due to the large number of athletes already on the course who were relative beginners and unaware of general bike course conduct. About 3 miles into the bike I came up on a group of 15-20 women riding in a pack and taking up the entire lane. I called out “on your left” several times and they didn’t move, and I really didn’t want to cross the double yellow line into oncoming traffic just to get around them. Some of the women had moved over so I found a space to pass through the middle of the group. Right after that happened the head race official passed and wrote down my number. I tried not to let it bother me but I do think it affected the rest of my race. I was orginally third overall in 1:06:05. Upon checking the penalty list, however, I saw that I had been given a 2:00 penalty for an illegal pass. This is the only penalty I’ve gotten in 7 years of racing, so of course I asked the head official what exactly I had done that constituted an illegal pass. I know the rules state that you should always pass on the left, unless passing on the right is a safer alternative. In that situation I personally thought it was safer to pass on the right rather than moving into oncoming traffic, but the race official was adamant that I had room to pass on the left. I’ve been racing for several years now and I NEVER pass on the right unless I’m certain that it’s completely unsafe to pass on the left. I’m also not sure why the women riding in the pack didn’t get a penalty for drafting/blocking, because if they had been riding single file in the first place I wouldn’t have had this problem, but I really didn’t want to argue with the race official. In retrospect, I still think I made the right decision during the race, and if I had to do it over again I would do the same thing. I respect the race official’s opinion, but in this case I’m not sure she was a good judge of what’s safe or not. Anyway, I got bumped down to 5th overall with the penalty, so I was kind of upset about that. But luckily my next 2 races have time trial starts so I won’t have to pass quite so many people!