Here’s a true account of the wonderful misadventures that befell our cyclo-cross race in Chicago on Sunday:
Apparently there’s been some “environmental damage” caused by all the riders out at Palos (a forest preserve). Until they decide what the policy is, they’re not going to issue any more permits for races at Labagh Woods (the forest preserve where weíve been racing every fall for at least five years–longer than I’ve lived here). Yesterday’s race was only allowed because the permit had already been issued.
Now comes the fun part. Shortly after I arrived yesterday, when all and sundry were quite pissed off about the cancellation of the cyclo-cross season, the “forest preserve police” came and arrested the race promoter. It seems that the permit specifies that you can’t exchange money (i.e. collect entries and distribute prizes) on county property. It’s okay to charge for a race, you just have to use preregistration. It seems rather an odd coincedence that they should choose to enforce this particular ordinance at the last race, and that they should toss the promoter in the back of a cruiser and write up a citation instead of just delivering a nice civilized warning. Particularly since we’ve been doing it this way for at least five years, with no objections from anyone. It was pretty silly; we had a marvellous time riding around the three police cars making snide remarks along the lines of “our tax dollars hard at work” and “glad to see that you’ve finally finished solving all those crimes,” etcetera, etcetera.
A fairly annoying morning, all in all. There’s a petition being passed round, which will be sent to the scrotums responsible for this assininity.
Scott Anderson
From: somalley@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu (Sean O’Malley)
Subject: Lovely irony
For those of you who “enjoy” dealing with bureaucracies, here’s a good one:
We (The Ohio U collegiate team) were researching possible places to hold a MTB race this fall. Ten miles from school is a large chunk of the Wayne National Forest which has lots of *government approved* motorcycle/ATV trails. We ride these trails quite often, so figured it’d be a great venue. But wait! This is the Federal Government we’re dealing with. We were told it would take six months notice to hold a race. Seems the government would have to do an environmental impact study. Boy. Wouldn’t want those MTBs damaging the ruts left by the motorcycles…
