Giro di Burnaby 2006 - start here

It's been so long since I used this blog, I'd forgotten how to manage it. Found some junk comments and (I think) deleted them, but accidentally deleted one of Dave's in the process. Sorry, Dave!

I took a bunch of pictures at yesterday's inaugural Giro di Burnaby. Not exactly a run, but so many Bushtits were involved, it counts as an honourary event. I'll post them in batches. And I will try to keep this a bit more up-to-date than I have been!

The Giro was really an amazing thing, both the event and the behind the scenes activities. At noon, people arrived at the Safeway parking lot at Willingdon and Hastings and started the set-up. Once the athletes' village was done, and some fencing had arrived, people fanned out into the surrounding streets to begin putting up fencing between the road and the sidewalks. And at 6 p.m. Hastings was closed to traffic and everyone sprang into action, fencing off Hastings between Rosser and McDonald, including the course dog-legs at either end of that stretch, and piling hay at potential wipe-out areas. We had an hour to do that, and we'd finished the fencing before the 7 p.m. start of the women's race. It was a wonderful feat of team-work, with everyone seeming to know what to do and when to do it without any fuss - you'd think we'd been putting up fences for years! We would have finished the hay in time as well, but it was a bit late arriving. Even so, the race started only about 15 minutes late.

Watching those cyclists screaming around the course was breathtaking at times. The men were going so fast that there was a wind after them. Incredibly, there were only a couple of crashes - one at the end of the women's race, and one during the men's race. Volunteers opened a section of fence and were on and off the course with mangled bikes and unmangled riders in a matter of seconds. What a crew!

I tried taking pictures of the women's race, but none of them turned out well, even with my reasonably fool-proof digital camera. Better luck next year. I also didn't get any of the take-down at the end of the race, which actually went faster than the set-up.

I'm posting the ones I got in batches.

The first group of pictures were taken at noon or so, as set-up of the athletes' village got underway....