5th Southern California 2-day - NE

San Diego, California, USA , October 12-13, 2007

Results

Silva & Alia take fifth SoCal two day

By Shaun Wallace

The fifth running of the Southern California Madison saw the strongest-yet field of riders compete over two days in its traditional variety of events, including some new races.

As with the fourth edition of this event, the velodrome's community grew by one over the weekend. This time it was Sean Olin who had to step back from racing as his wife was giving birth. Giovanni Rey's flight from San Francisco was delayed 4 hours, so a quick shuffle of the 18 remaining riders ensured everyone had a partner for the first night.

The youngest pairing of the race, Iggy Silva and Dana Alia took an early lead during the motorpaced Madison, though the gap was closed when the events' oldest pairing of organizer/racer Shaun Wallace, paired with medic/racer Dr. Allen Richburg, won the ensuing "team-win-and-out" where both riders had to score a victory for the team to be awarded points.

The closest race of the meeting was the 8-lap madison-pursuit where pairs were joined to make 4-man teams. The crowd and one official picked the team of Richburg, Wallace, Dan Holloway and Eric Losak, but the three remaining officials gave the edge to Silva, Alia, John Arnold and Everett Hauser.

With Giovanni Rey joining his team-mate Matt Chambers, the duo scored well in the final race of the night, a 72 lap Madison, but couldn't make up enough ground to take the lead from the local youngsters.

It's been a great year at San Diego velodrome with record numbers on Tuesday nights both racing and spectating, and all adult and (expanded) youth classes filled. This was celebrated in style after the first night with live music and food and drinks for all the riders, officials, friends and family. And yes, more than one person did indeed spend the night at the track.

One statistic that was not unusual for San Diego was how no races in 2007 had been canceled due to rain. However this run was almost broken on Saturday, and by the time the blue skies did force their way through, the event had to be shortened to a 20-lap motorpace that went directly into 96 laps of madison.

By the end, the Silva/Alia pairing proved to be too strong and were the clear winners, but the organizers had evidently done a good job of balancing other teams. Coming up to the halfway mark, Chambers/Rey were in second place overall, but two sprints later were surpassed by the dark-horse team of Kevin Schiller and James Keiser, who themselves lost the second-overall slot to Wallace/Richburg after the next sprint. However, coming from only fifth place overall with three sprints remaining, it was national criterium champion Dan Holloway and Eric Losak who stole the runner-up slot with a fine last-minute attack.

Results

1 Iggy Silva / Dana Alia                 177 pts
2 Dan Holloway / Eric Losak              139
3 Shaun Wallace / Allen Richburg         136
4 Matt Chambers / Giovanni Rey           134
5 Kevin Schiller / JamesKeiser           133
6 John Arnold / Adam Smith               123
7 Glenn Garrovillas / Eric Hollenbeck    119
DNF John Allen / Chris Lindensmith          
DNF Stephen Skory / Tyler Ofstad