Monsters of the Midway Race Recap!

Back in March, J. Tati stormed into our meeting at ICA HQ  to demand that a certain phrase be placed in the minutes: The 2012 edition of the Monsters of the Midway will be the biggest and best crit EVER in the city of Chicago.

Well Monster’s came and conquered this past weekend. While xXx, Half Acre Cycling, and The U of C Velo Club can duke it out as to who’s crits were the biggest and best in Chicago, the ICA can attest that Monsters was the best crit ever on the beautiful University of Chicago campus.  
Big thanks to the race director, Katie Mann and her team for making it run smoothly and booking the smoothest race announcing talent in the midwest.

The weather wasn’t perfect. But the riders should have known this beforehand,  especially since the ICA was giving away autographed Tom Skilling postcards as Primes! You can tell Janette Rho was almost as proud of winning that prime as helping her Les Petite Victoires teammate, Cady Chintis, get onto the 2nd step of the Women’s Open podium (and by podium we mean bales of hay).

Another standout performance came from Michael Dutczak of the South Chicago Wheelmen.  First he won one of the Tom Skilling primes. Then he went on to win that Cat 4 race. Then he didn’t even have time to do an ICA blog interview, because he turned around to do the cat 4 / 5 race where he came in 10th! Awesome. Maybe at Glencoe he won’t double up and we can get an interview with him.  Or maybe I’ll just interview his brother Mitchell again instead.  

Big big ups to  Niki Cyp, Brenda and Steve Feehery, Chris Jensen, Stephen Thordarson and moto-ref David Papadopoulos for making the racing fair and safe all day long!  Thanks to them the results are already up on USA Cycling.

Finally, here is the one interview I DID get yesterday, with the smokin’ fast ladies of Les Petite Victoires:

For more of Amy's great pictures check out her Monsters set on Flickr.