On The Pegs November 2018 - Volume 3 - Issue 11 | Page 128

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DBG’S LINE
A TRI-MONTHLY COLUMN BY DANIEL BLANC-GONNET
After a solid three days back at work following the last rounds of the US national
championships and the Canadian championship, I was headed to Prague, Czech
Republic! I arrived in the capital city Tuesday morning and got to take advantage
of my early arrival to tour the city before the rest of team USA was to join me. This
was the first foreign country I have been to that did not have either a germanic or
latin language base meaning that I could not even sound out the words written
on the street signs or menu’s! First thing I noticed about the Czech Republic is all
the commodities are so cheap! A good lunch and a pint was about $5 USD (or 110
Koruna, the local currency), and the hotel was only $30 a night. The city had some
of the most beautiful architecture I have ever seen; compared to most of the west-
ern european countries,thearchitecture was very gothic with dark stone, sharp
features, and sad statues.
Wednesday morning I met up with the team and we made our way to the trial
On The Pegs
Vol. 3 Issue 11 - November 2018
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site in Sokolov. Thursday was a prep day where we test fitted our gear, stickered
the helmets, bought food for the week, and caught up with friends. Friday was
where the rubber hit the road; We received our new bikes still in crates and had
to assemble them, break the new bikes in, do technical inspection, and go out for
the first official practice. This day of the world championship’s is always so hectic!
Something interesting that happened in technical inspection is that Trial GP’s new
procedure involves swapping out the CDI’s of the bikes to their own version that
has a rev limiter so all bikes can be tested at the same RPM for sound compliance.
As for practice, well, that is always insane. Imagine almost 120 talented riders
practicing all within a square mile! People are flying every which-way trying to
make use of the short amount of time to get adjusted to the terrain and also a little
bit of the ‘fluffing of the feathers’ effect where riders all seem to try and show off.
Very intimidating!
Saturday was qualification day. During qualifying, two out of the three riders ride
a predetermined section as fast as they can without taking any points. The points
are counted sfirst, then ties on points go to the faster time. The order of quickest
runs from first to last run in reverse order the following day for startime time;
This means that the slowest riders go out first.
The days events started out with another official practice along with a practice for
our qualifying
run. The qualifying section was relatively straightforward but was surprisingly
hard to go fast as it had little flow and many radical changes of direction. Pat put
forward a blazing run getting the fastest practice qualifier for the international
class! I knew that for the final qualifying run, all I had to do was get a solid quick
time with no dabs and Pat could go all out for victory! In the
actual qualifier, Pat went first and set a time at least two second faster than the
next country while my run was exactly what I wanted, quick enough to break any
ties but not crazy to waste energy or crash. In the end, Noe Petralli set the fastest
time with an awesome run; he even had his Hebo sun visor down! The Czech team
mysteriously flopped during the qualifying to go almost first the following day in
the trial; Was this on purpose or did they really mess up? We shall see...
That evening, the annual TDN parade was scheduled where every country par-
ticipates in a parade to the podium where the team riders are introduced and the
pictures are taken.
While lining up for the parade, my teammate Sam Fastle and I ran around and got
a picture with every team we could which I think ended up being 14 teams! That
evening, we had a USA team dinner of spaghetti and meatballs where the last min-
ute preparation and pep talks were done.