The Georgia Cup Series’ Rome Omnium

Saturday I spent roundabouts five hours standing in a 40 degree windy rain to photograph a bunch of dudes in tight pants riding bicycles in circles around downtown.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the Georgia Cup series Rome Omnium!

I had to look up “omnium” in my dictionary widget on my dashboard (times are changing, eh?). In case anyone was wondering, even though my spell check on Firefox says it is not a word, an “omnium,” is a “collection of miscellaneous people or things.”

So… there you go.

The Georgia Cup is a series of cycling races around, you got it, Georgia. Also part of this series is the Twilight Criterium in Athens I shot a couples years ago. I don’t frequent bike races much, but the Rome Omnium, brought to us all by local race team Rome Velo was stinkingly similar to Athens’ criterium. Except yesterday the races took place during the day, and it was raining, and there was almost no crowd because the weather was sucked big ol’ bicycle tires. As well, in the criterium I believe the racers rode for a particular number of laps per race. Today, depending on division, cyclists rode for specified period of time plus an additional 3 laps. So I guess it wasn’t that much like the Twilight.

The Rome News-Tribune office is right downtown on 6th Avenue. One of the benefits to this is that anytime there is a big event downtown – such as a parade or a bike race – where roads are blocked and parking is not so good, we can just walk.

For instance, the photo above, which is very close to the race’s start / finish line, was taken just over the hill from our office. Actually, all of these photos were taken “just over the hill” from our office.

Good parts to this are you don’t get stuck in traffic, you can make more web updates which makes the bossmen happy and you get lots of exercise. The bad part is that this can quickly get exhausting especially if these things happen on days when it is cold and/or raining, where I will wear my very warm and completely waterproof but rather heavy trekking boots. As wonderful as those boots are (no, really), they’ll also do a number on your feet after a full day of it, because they’re made for climbing mountains, not hauling ass all over Beautiful Historic Downtown Rome.

The weather really could have been worse. Yeah, it was between 40 and 50 degrees outside all day long, and it pretty much rained all day long. Occasionally we’d get a break, but not for long. At least most of the time it wasn’t heavy rain. It was bad enough to drive away the crowds, which usually have a decent turnout for things like this.

I did find one person who came out to watch but didn’t have any connection to the race or any of the cyclists…

Mrs. Waddell and her husband, who both watched the race last year, parked on the road outside City Hall near the first turn in the race. They watched from the car. Smart people.

Discussing f-bombs and racing strategy…

Every race has at least one turn somewhere that’s the real bitch turn. There will be lots of wiping out in this area. The Rome Omnium’s obligatory bitch turn was conveniently located right outside the Rome News-Tribune office.

First you fly down Glenn Milner Boulevard before negotiating turn…

Negotiate turn.

Don’t forget that it’s raining and the road is very slippery, and also really uneven and slope=y right at that turn. If you bank the turn too wide there’s a good chance you’re tires are going to slip on the yellow road lines (because for some reason those are a little more slippery than the rest of the road) and you’ll slide just enough to hit that big uneven dip on the wide part of the road and completely wipe out.

If you do it right, it looks like this…

If you do it wrong, it can look something more like a broken collar bone and busted bike frame…

Or just a broken nose.

… Because that’s what happens when you speed 25+ miles an hour head-first into a hundred-year-old water oak, or into the guy in front of you who wiped out sending you ass over tip into the tree.

The same corner also contributed to at least 4 other cases of road rash.

If I don’t quit this post now, it’s going on forever. Foreverrrr.

I made a big photo gallery online. I figured it was all I could do since I rarely actually get a day to cover a single thing. We are still in the process of switching websites and I still can’t direct link to the gallery, so I will leave you to the maze of links from the RNT website to find it (it’s ok, really, it’s like Where’s Waldo kind of!)(did you know Where’s Waldo is online?! Holy crap!).

Or you can find the link to the galleries in our event coverage here:

Rain Soaked Cyclists Hone Racing Skills During Georgia Cup by John Bailey, (who was nice and stood in the rain with me a little while)

Annnnd if you want, you can see my tutorial on how to shoot a Twilight Criterium in the April 2007 blog post How To Shoot A Twilight Criterium

and oh yeah here are the race results.