Here’s Steve Shannon’s Six-Days report for day-one. As we head into day-two Steve’s report sounds like a nightmare, outlining the behind the scenes confusion the official ISDE site won’t tell you about. I bet if we keep cheering Victoria Hett can get the Silver Medal she’s fighting for!

Hi Everyone,
I’m going to keep this one short, as I need to get to bed. Day-one has been quite the roller coaster, leaving most of Team Canada exhausted. Victoria took off this morning looking great, posting respectable times and was quite happy all morning. She’s been dealing with a stomach bug but all morning she was fine. At TC3 the course workers screwed up and made her go through 1 minute early, giving her a 60 second penalty. No big deal, we should be able to get it sorted out in the jury meeting later, or so we thought.

As the day went on Tory kept riding well but not feeling good at all. Painful stomach cramps weren’t much fun, but she persevered and stayed on time. Everything was looking good until right at the end of the day. Tory showed up at the pre-check before her work period 25 minutes early, but it took us 10 minutes to realize she had forgot to ride one of the special tests. A Mexican Course Marshall had pointed Tory in the wrong direction, so she missed the test at no fault of her own. Tory raced back to the test, did it, then came back to check-six just on time. She then blasted off a tire change in under five minutes (better than a lot of trophy riders!), changed the oil and put a fresh air filter in before impounding on time! It was stressful with her running back to do test 8, but we figured we were in the clear, and looking at her test times we saw she was only 20 seconds off gold so far!

The real drama started when we got back to the condo and I checked results. The results listed Tory as ‘retired’ AKA did not finish. Because she did the tests in the wrong order (she did test 9 before 8), they said she was disqualified. We were furious to say the least, as Tory was doing awesome and would be looking at a strong silver medal if she kept it up, or maybe even a gold medal!

After phone calls and heated discussions our team manager did get Tory re-instated in the race, so she will be able to continue her quest for an ISDE medal. Unfortunately, they gave her a one-hour penalty, essentially ruining her chances at finishing on anything but bronze. Ever the competitor, Tory is going to plug away over the next 5 days and hopefully she’ll be able to get back on silver time, but it will be tough. It’s a major piss off, since if Tory was French or Italian it is very unlikely she would have received a penalty. Six Days politics are very, very frustrating.

Right now she’s resting and hopefully the stomach cramps will go away so Tory really get on the gas and get that silver medal.

That’s about it for now, and I’ll try to update you all again tomorrow night.

Steve