Seventeen Years of Classic Off-Road Bike Racing - Is the 24-Hours of Moab Gone Forever?
Sweeping across the roof of my coach, the rain
sounded like brushes on a snare drum. Slow to awaken, I realized that I
was in Moab, Utah on Saturday, October 8, 2011. As the rain became a
steady drone in my consciousness, I thought about the upcoming 24-Hours
of Moab (24HOM) off-road bike race, scheduled to start at noon that day.
My plan was to create a twenty-four hour internet webcam feed at the race venue, Behind the Rocks. Heavy rainfall could make that task difficult, if not impossible.
By
nine that morning, after traversing several miles of Moab mud, I
arrived at the race venue. Under light rain and a threatening sky, I
unpacked computers, cables and cameras. Using onsite generator power and
a wireless internet connection provided by race promoter Granny Gear
Productions, I was soon up and running. Then, a new obstacle arose. For
reasons unknown, there was no response from the MoabLive.com servers,
collocated in Los Angeles, California. For the next hour, our file
transfer protocol (FTP) requests went unanswered. Without cooperation
from our servers, there would be no “live feed” that day by Moab Live.
By 11 AM, the rain had stopped and the Moab Live
servers began accepting FTP requests. Then, every three seconds, like
clockwork, our ancient Dell Windows-XP computer began firing out a new .JPG image
to the world. Was anybody watching? Just before race-start at noon on
Saturday, the servers again went dark. Rather than fretting about events
that I could not control, I headed out to photograph the Le Mans style,
running start of the 24 Hours of Moab 2011.
If
you have not yet seen it, this may have been your last chance to do so,
but more about that later. At noon, a blast from the race gun was so
loud that it echoed off the redrocks, half a mile away. Before that echo
had returned, hundreds of self-designed athletes began a two-hundred yard foot race.
Their goal was to run clockwise around the most famous bush in all of
off-road racing, and then back to their bikes, waiting in the racks.
Like a lightning bolt of new energy, that lone juniper was point-focus
for racer and spectator alike. All had come to experience the universal adrenaline-pump known to the cognoscenti as the 24-HOM.
Sixty-three year old Ray Alters of Team Curly
watched as his son, Steve Alters ran in honor of his brother, taken by
death in a pedestrian-car accident eighteen months ago. Father Ray would
go on later to take his fallen son’s place for two laps of exciting
action. With assist from a cane that supported his immobilized left leg,
fifty-four year old, separately-abled Frank Garduno completed the run.
Understandably, he was last to mount up and ride.
Over the next twenty-four hours, Frank completed three 14.93 mile laps,
averaging six hours and twenty minutes per lap. With a course elevation
between 5,000 and 5,774 feet, Garduno gained 4,080 feet in elevation,
all powered by hope, heart and one good leg.
At the morning prerace meeting, Race Director, Laird Knight spoke the words that no one interested in off-road bicycle racing
wanted to hear. Registration numbers were down for 2011, resulting in a
$50,000 shortfall at the bottom line. Without a quick addition of
sponsorship revenue, this would likely be the seventeenth and final 24-Hours of Moab. At Behind the Rocks, stunned silence hung in the cold, damp air. Then, with a shift of energy
that lasted for the next full day, Laird Knight encouraged everyone to
go out, have fun and to ride this race as if it were his or her last
one.
Outside of a few U.S. mountain biking enclaves, like Santa Cruz, California and the Front Range in Colorado,
traditional U.S. media has largely ignored the sport. Skateboarding
gets more live airtime. Soon, I was heartened to see British TV
presenter and adventurer Ben Fogle, with his BBC Worldwide. All weekend, they taped footage for a segment of their upcoming, “A Year of Adventures”
reality series. Ironically, the Moab segment will not air until after
the decision to keep or cancel the 24-Hours of Moab 2012. What the
mountain biking sport and the 24-Hours of Moab need is immediate
sponsorship by a U.S. television network or other caring sponsor.
Although the BBC focus as mainly on Fogle, their upcoming episode might
go down in history as the only mass-market television presentation of
this fabled event. Either way, everyone knew that this race was history –
in the making.
While I ruminated on the economic pressures
surrounding this classic race, the gun sounded and the race was on.
Spencer Lacy, lead racer on the “Rise of the Penguins” team was first to
complete the run and mount his bike. He was
also first to veer off course, coming almost wiping out the BBC
soundman. Maybe that mad penguin atop Spencer's helmet wanted some
attention. With physical disaster averted, the Moab-style nuclear dust storm
created by one thousand feet pounding the desert ebbed, flowed and then
vanished. With their own Ben Fogle already on the course, the BBC team
finished their scene with tight focus on photogenic Men’s Solo Rider
Nick Ybarra. Famous for winning slow races, Nick exhibited perfect form
as he entered the first of his nine laps around the fourteen-mile
course. The smile on Nick’s face seemed to say, “Look, Mom, I’m on TV”.
Nick’s mother will be proud to know that he did not say. “Look, Ma, no
hands!”
In October 2012, what the world needs is a live video-feed from the 24-Hours of Moab. With our limited resources, all that Moab Live could do this year is provide a proof-of-concept, employing a live webcam at race central.
From noon until one PM Saturday, I felt like a high school audio-visual
monitor who could not get his 16-millimeter film projector to work.
During that break, I snapped a picture of then second-place, but eventual Men's Solo winner, Andy Jacques Maynes
as he entered the scoring tent. After an hour of racing, the Moab Live
internet servers must have heard our plea. Around that time, our servers
came back on-line and then stayed up for the remainder of the race.Our
thanks go out to Mark Williams of TheHostPros.com.
His all-night effort got Moab24Live.com webcam feed online again. Such
are the unsung heroes and volunteers who make the 24-Hours of Moab the
unique event that it is.
On Sunday morning, after eighteen hours of racing,
the Granny Gear wireless connection failed, leaving our webcam offline
for over an hour. Checking status on my new LG Thrill smart phone from
AT&T, I saw four-bars lit up on the signal indicator. Turning on its
Wi-Fi hotspot function, I reconnected to the Moab Live servers. From
then until the end of the race, my cobbled-together wireless connection
provided an uninterrupted webcam feed at Moab24Live.com.
After
the race was over, the whole experience left me pondering the subject
of macroeconomics. If I can put together a live internet broadcast for
less than two hundred dollars, why cannot ESPN.com, GoDaddy.com or
FoxSports.com fork over $100K for broadcast rights. That is all the
money it would take to keep this original, classic race where it should
be, Behind the Rocks at Moab, Utah in October 2012.
By James McGillis at 09:58 PM | | Comments (0) | Link
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