The Adventures of Jono

Updates and flashbacks...Tour of California

Well the Tour of California photo gallery is bursting at the seams after several late nights of editing and uploading. Right now it sits at almost 400 photos in the gallery. In total I took just about 9,000 frames
between the press conference before the race through the last podium on Sunday. Of course a lot of those are sequences like finishes where you might click off 30 frames as they come across the line so I think that total number is a little deceiving. In shooting the finish like that I'll only save maybe 1 or 2 of the good ones and dump the rest.

Just before I left for California, literally the day before, I got a shiny new Canon Mark III. That definitely made a difference with the number of frames I took since the Mark III shoots at 10 frames per second. And being a 10 megapixel camera that means some pretty large files. So to help with the large files I also got the new Lexar UDMA memory cards and UDMA card reader. This helps things a lot when downloading at the end of the day since the new cards are 300x for speed verses the older "high speed" cards which were 144x. What this translates to is download times which are more in the 4-5 minute range for downloading 2 4gb cards at once with 2 piggybacked readers verses more like 8-10 minutes each for the older cards using 1 card reader. And what that translates to is being able to get to editing faster which means I can post photos quicker, which means I can leave the press room sooner, which means we get to dinner quicker, which means we get to the hotel faster and therefor get to bed sooner. One hick up in the chain, not including time spent at the bar of course, and it means you get less sleep and are a little more worn out for working the next day. Over the course of a 7 day race those little bits of lost sleep add up and significantly add to your overall feeling of being completely shattered by the end; which you are going to feel anyway but the idea is to minimize that as much as possible and the simple purchase of the latest read/write technology can place you well on the road to redemption.

Flashbacks......cold...rain...7 hours on the back of a moto. What was I thinking? On stage 4 this
year we got some horrible weather. We'd all been watching earlier in the week and hoping that the forecast would change but our prayers would not be answered. That morning I put on every layer I had and even broke out my Gore-tex socks. Gore-tex socks are my last resort. If I break out the Gore-tex socks you can be sure that there is some apocalyptic weather headed our way and it would be high time to make sure the insurance policies are paid up, you've said "I love you" to everyone you care for and you've made your peace with whom or whatever you worship. I think my prediction was spot on for stage 4 and I believe any of the riders who left the start line that day would agree.

Highway 1 had the potential for providing a beautiful backdrop to what is quickly becoming an early season favorite in the pro peloton. Instead we got sheets of rain blowing in sideways buffeted by 50 mph gusts of wind that blew icy sea air into our faces. In some places visibility dropped to what seemed like the inside of the visor on my helmet. At one point the rain was stinging my face and the wind was blowing my helmet backwards on my head so I stuck my hand up inside my helmet to cover my face and pull down on the visor so it wasn't blowing around. People at the races always say how great of a job I have, how lucky I am. Well I can't argue that but on that day the romanticism wore off and I would gladly have traded any one of them for there place in line at Starbucks to get a grande caramel machiato while waiting in town for the finish.

What kept me going on that day was several things. One of those things was the riders themselves. Geez can those guys suffer. To be sitting next to the break and the rain is coming down, the wind is ripping across the road and it just can't be any worse of a day to be out on a bike and those guys keep hammering. Not only do they keep hammering along but then at the end Dominique Rollin has the where-with-all to attack. What planet is that guy from? And then you've got big George Hincapie right behind him! While that is going on my fellow photographers Casey Gibson, Doug Pensinger, Graham Watson, Tim deWaele and Al Crawford are right there shooting all the action. I know they are just as miserable as I am but they are still working so why should I do any less? To top it all off our moto drivers are the guys taking the brunt of the wind and rain, at least I get some break from sitting behind the driver. Of course most of them do have electric jackets to keep them warm so don't feel too bad for them. :) But seriously, as cold and wet and nasty as it was they still got us where we needed to be when we needed to be there and I did not hear of one mishap that day. I can't explain how good those guys are to do what they do with us poking and prodding them all day. I've been in more high adrenalin situations on the back of a motorcycle over the years than I can count and I've always made it out without a scratch because of the spectacular driving done by the professional crew of drivers we have at the races. I'd go anywhere and back with them.

At the end of the day it took me almost an hour of sitting in the car with the heat cranked to get myself to stop shaking. I changed some layers and got rid of the wet ones. My cameras and gear was completely soaked but somehow I got it all through the day without anything being unusable. Even my flash which tends to fill up with water made it. Normally the water fills up the back screen and I use it as a sort of gauge. If it gets to a certain point I know it will be OK and things aren't too bad. But if it goes past that mark and the water continues to collect then its a bad day and trouble is coming. I guess you could look at it as the flash being half full or half empty. I'm a pretty optimistic guy but as far as I'm concerned if the flash is half full that's a bad thing.

It all goes back to the Gore-tex socks. I use them in the worst of weather and they are meant to keep my feet dry and warm. On stage 4 they were anything but and when I finally took them off at the end of the day I would say they were just about half full. As comedian Lewis Black says, "something has gone askeeew." The socks called it but even they couldn't withstand the wrath of mother nature that long cold day on stage 4. In the end it will be a day for all to remember; an epic 7 hour day with hellish weather that many didn't survive. It will go down in the history of cycling as the day another great Canadian cyclist was recognized with the win by Dominique Rollin. For me, I will never forget the wet, cold misery of that day and you can be sure that at the next race I'll have some better @%$# socks!

Gobble Gobble

I was going through some photos last night looking for something and ran across this photo I took at last years Tour of California on stage 3. Stage 3 is when we head into the finish in San Jose and is the day of the now infamous Sierra Rd. climb. Once you make the crest of Sierra Rd it is a long narrow, twisty and steep descent back down to the run in to San Jose. This is one of the days where you can really see who is a good descender and who isn't. And it's a day that makes me have the utmost respect for how well the pros can handle there bikes.

So this day I was on the moto with one of the best photo moto drivers, Walt Conte, and we had been having a great day of shooting. At the base of the climb I had timed it just right and gotten on the front of the break as it hit the bottom of the hill. If you don't time things right and your back shooting the field or chase groups and you roll up onto the back of the break on a climb like this the commissar often won't let you pass because its either too dangerous or the road is too narrow. But if you can get in front just at the base you can drop back to the front of the break and shoot until your memory card is smoking. Well, that is as long as the tv moto isn't in the way, or their aren't 5 other photo bikes stacked up rotating backwards to get shots, or the lead controller on the road says it OK, the front moto marshal says its OK and you aren't knocking fans off the road. The last item of concern is how close you are to the top of the climb. The problem here is that you have to leave plenty of room between you and the front of the riders so that they don't run into the back of you on the descent. Not that I have had this happen mind you. :) You get the idea though, things get hectic.

Finally we get in there, get the shots and we get out in plenty of time. As you come up over the top of Sierra Rd and see the other side you see how steep it really is. Not only is it steep but its narrow, the turns at the top are very tight and a lot of it has no shoulder with big drop offs. So we see the top. We pass the KOM sign. And as we begin to crest the top Walt nails it and we accelerate down the straight and through the first hairpin. I love it. When your in the zone like that and shooting and the adrenalin is pumping hard it all starts to come together. Thats when you better not choke and miss the shot.

As we descend Walt and I get in sync so that we flow smoothly through the turns withoutfighting each other or the bike. The bike we were on, I can't remember what it was now, had had the suspension adjusted to sit low by the rental shop. This was a bad idea for us since Walt at the time probably weighed about 230 and I was the same, not to mention all of my gear. With the turns being that tight and us leaning as much as we could the bottom of the bike was dragging hard in places. I could imagine us looking like a scene out of Mad Max; motorcycle dragging through the turns with sparks flying, this giant Aussie bloke (Walt) driving like a bat out of hell and me hanging off the back with all kinds of gear flopping everywhere. How can the American public not be entertained by bike racing, or at least the sideshow that goes along with it?

The road finally straightened a bit and the speedo rolled up past 70mph. We were in our groove now. A few more turns and the road would level off. I could feel Walt lay into the throttle a little more just to......well, go faster. All of the sudden I could see something up ahead in the road! A tree branch maybe, or a cardboard box, something that fell off a truck? It couldn't have been either because I could see movement. Then I realized what it was, 2 turkeys! What the?!! Walt backed off a tiny bit and laid on the horn. Just as we got close the 2 birds did their best flying imitation, gained maximum lift of a couple feet and in a flurry of feather and beaks made it to the side of the road. Disaster averted.