I arrived at Listerfield at 7:30am and got straight into it. I cleaned tables, chairs, filled Eskys, taped notices to team tables and made sure the general team areas were clean. The teams started arriving prtty early, about 8am. The women didn't race till 10:30am. I had one fairly important job to do. I had to get all the teams shite up to the feed/tech stations out on the track. The night before i'd typed up a notice which told the team managers about how i was gunna get all their equipment to the stations. So come 9:30am there was a HUGE pile of team equipment ready to be taken out. We did 3 trips, each time packing the UTE to the rim!!  It took us 45 mins to get the equipment out to the stations. At 10am there were thousands of people streaming into Lysterfield!!!

The women's race was a pretty one sided affair. As usuall, the Canadian chicks kicked everyone's ass. It realy pays to grow up in Canada!! Check out results here. Race videos here and here.

The guys race was far more exciting.  From the start gun Ozzie, Chris Jongewaard, went out hard. He was blitzing the field. At the at lap 5 he had a 1:30 lead over the chasing group. However with 1 lap to go, that time had pissed away to about 40secs. Halfway through the last lap he was caught by the chase group of Killeen, Beckingsale and Mc Grath, and that's how they finished. Jongewaard really went out hard and pretty much died in the ass.  The faviourate, Geoff Kabush, didn't even get a lookin at the podium. He had a mega hard race. Each time i saw him he look way too hot. The heat was really screwing with him.  Check out results here.

I'd have to say that there were only 2 dissapointing things to come out of the day. First ting was as the race was finishing. In the male's race, if you were out of the top 10(ish) you weren't aloud to finish the race under the Start/Finish banner. Because they had to set up the poduim, they stopped all the racers from coming down the finish straight. So Geoff didn't even get to ride under the banner and hear the croud screeming. All the guys that flew from Kenya and Nambia didn't even get to REALLY finish. They had to do this to run in with the TV programming. 4 years of planning and they couldn't even let everyone finish. Bit shit if you ask me.

The 2nd thing was after the teams had left the team prep areas. There was a huge mess everywhere. With bins placed only a few steps away from their tents, there was rubbish all over the place. I'd like to thank the New Zealand team for being the only team to clean their area. I guess when you become a pro rider, you obviously think that everyone is below you and you stop caring about the environment.

I chatted to some of the Scottish and New Zealand teams after the race and they all had a ball.  Great event Snozza!!!