Weekend Racing Report - November 5, 2005

Can you believe it’s the off-season?!!!

Typically after the last road race of the year a road cycling team will disband, with people training on their own or in small groups, until the road season starts again in early spring.

Not the Sunrise Sports Cycling Team!!!

With the start of the Cyclocross season, the team has jumped in with both feet. Focussing on the Tailwind.net cyclocross series in SE Michigan, a dedicated core of the team has been very active, both in racing and organizing/promotion.

In terms of racing, the team has been doing great. In the top category Elite Men’s classification Andy Weir, Brian Rosewarne, Jordan Stohl and junior racer Alex Keomany have been battling it out with Michigans best cyclocrossers each weekend. Alex is sitting best placed tied for 12th overall. Watch for him to move up over the next couple of races.

In the Masters 35+ category Rich Stark has been ON FIRE! He’s currently in 2nd place overall, only 2 points behind 1st. The battle for the overall is going to be FIERCE!

In the Juniors 15-18 class, new Sunrise Sports Juniors Team members Rafi Kronenberg and Brendan Pauly are placed 1st and 3rd respectively.

In addition to racing, the team has also been working with Robert Linden of Tailwind Enterprises in the set-up, tear down, announcing and race promotion of the series. Most visible have been Rich Stark working as lead race setup/tear down and Joe Lekovish working as race announcer for the series. Assisting Robert in these capacities has given the team and it’s sponsors a HUGE amount of EXPOSURE within the Michigan cyclocross scene.

Check out www.tailwind.net for full cyclocross series information.

ICEMAN COMETH Race Report

Over the weekend of November 5-6 many of the team turned out to race the ICEMAN COMETH mtn bike race in Traverse City, MI. This race is the BIGGEST competitive cycling event in the USA and the team was all over!

It was great to see a really big turnout from the team. Incredibly, the announcer at the start line was giving the team great mentions over the PA in front of the thousands of racers preparing for the start. More than just a few times you heard something like "there's another of the Sunrise Sports riders warming up", even "there's a lot of strong teams here, there's Sunrise Sports in the orange and black". I felt like a celebrity warming up among the thousands of other racers after I heard our team called out like that.

It was also great to have promoter Steve "ICEMAN" Brown come over to me at the start line and personally shake my hand and tell me, "you Sunrise guys get 5' added to your time". Another familiar face at the start line was Robert Linden of Tailwind who also came over and gave me a good luck handshake. After the race my parents wanted to know why all the race officials were saying hello. With all work the team has been doing for Robert in the cyclocross series, we've really gotten noticed.

Despite some mechanicals which took out Andy Weir, Jay Rafeld and Mark Caswell, the team had two great performances with Jeff Hamilton placing 4th in the EXPERT 30-34 class and new junior team member Taylor Birmann winning the ALL MEN 12-14 class with a time of 1:55:12. INCREDIBLE for a kid only 13 years old!!!

Check out www.iceman.com for full race details.

Andy Weir takes a tumble on the tricky log barrier at the Tailwind Lower Huron CX Race. This log claimed more than one victim on this day!