[NCNCA] Nevada City Classic history

[Charles Howe]

Greetings everyone,

First of all, thank you to Les Earnest for his interest,
help, and encouragement with the the little project I made
of the history of the Nevada City Classic, which has been
discussed here recently.

Some background: the text of this document is, of course,
available at the official race web site, and has been for
many years.  When the site address was changed several
years back, the site was down for a time, and I became
concerned during the interregnum that this account of the
race's rather eventful past might be lost.  I therefore
went to archive.org, retrieved it, and put it in a
formatted document.  Since then, I've added bits of
information here and there from several individuals,
updated the list of past winners, polished the text, added
some graphics from the old web sites and made some of my
own, inserted links to sites with photos/race accounts, and
added the main photo from the '84 race, which I cadged from
Roger Marquis's web site.  I sent this to the race
organizer, but received no reply.

Recently, I turned it into a PDF document and sent it off
to Les and Tom Simonson for some comments on details of the
course, then posted it at

http://www.freewebs.com/velodynamics/NCChistory.pdf

I didn't realize Les would post that link so soon; I had
put off inserting most of the links within the document,
since I figured there was still some revising left to do
(there was).  That defect, the lack of a photo credit, and
a mistake in last year's juniors result have all since been
remedied (thanks to a member of this list for the latter).

One of the more interesting bits of help came in verifying
the 1991 men's winner, about whom there had been some
question.  Eventually, I was able to contact Len Pettyjohn,
who confirmed that "Hubes" (Chris Huber) had held off a
late-race charge by a certain Chance Legstrong -- er, Vance
Badstrong -- ah, whatever his name is.

It was also interesting to create a profile of the course. 
According to an old race write-up in VeloNews, as I recall
it, it was claimed that there were 400 feet of climbing in
each 1.1 mile lap, all of it coming in one continuous hill.
 Well, there are no mountains where I live, but I have
enough sense of distance and elevation (I train from time
to time on a 1.6 mile circuit with 236') to know that was
pretty tough.  A little math told me that either the
descent or the climb had to be, at a minimum, 13.8%. 
Yikes.  I don't know what would be worse, the pain of the
climb, or the terror of the descent.  Once I made the
profile, however, it became clear that the claim in VN was
a gross overestimate.

So enjoy -- and if you have any photos, anecdotes, or if
you can provide any of the missing results (see below),
please feel free to keep in touch.

Thank you,

Charles Howe

RESULTS NEEDED
Junior men: 1987-89, 1991-92, 1998, 2001-02
Women: 1987-89, 1991, 2002



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