Monday Morning Coffee Opinion Column

By Billy Rainford

That’s another Mini O’s at Gatorback Cycle Park in the books. If you’ve never been to this event, I’m not sure I can even describe it in words. 6000 entries over the course of 7 days in both Supercross and Motocross. It’s a living, breathing entity, this thing!

They’ve added a couple days to it over the past few years and I have to say it’s been a great thing. Yes, it starts earlier than it used to but the safety factor has gone up a lot with these changes. They can now add more track-work breaks into the schedule and I’m happy to see that. I’ve been there for a few terrible moments that could, arguably, have been avoided or at least lessened with time to manicure the track a little.

I will gladly go down to Florida for a couple extra days if it means we’re doing whatever we can to make our sport even a little bit safer for the riders.

I know a lot of you reading this may disagree with mid-day track work at a motocross event but when you look at the difference in skill and bike size that they accommodate at this event, it makes sense to get rid of a few kickers and fast braking bumps before the little 65’s hit the track.

Anyway, they did the breaks and I hope the end result was fewer ambulance calls. I did see a couple getting backed up during one of the later 65 races and I hope all of the young riders were treated and are doing fine.

I tried to get all my work done during the day’s racing with up-to-the-minute reporting on how our riders were doing as they were doing it. I hope that was a better way to follow along with our many Canadians competing than waiting until the end of the day, sitting at a Starbucks, and doing lengthy photo reports every night.

It was also nice to have Jessica “Longname” from Tree Three Media there with me to upload her nightly video edits featuring our Canucks and brought to you by KTM Canada. It was Jessica’s first trip to the Mini O’s and I think she was pretty blown away with how they’re able to get that many racers through that many races in a week. It really needs to be seen to be believed!

I was told a whole bunch of riders from Quebec would be there, but I never saw them. I hope I didn’t just miss them!

We had a bunch of riders there with differing goals. Some were there to go for podiums and be seen by the huge industry down there while others were there to take it all in and get some invaluable experience racing the biggest motocross race of the year. You think you’re fast? Go to Florida next November! It’s an eye-opener, to say the very least. We had riders racing in 35th place who were in bar-to-bar battles the entire time! It’s amazing how deep the talent pool is down there.

The Mini O’s is an event that I’ll try to attend as long as I can. It’s like no other race you’ll find anywhere. The weather was unseasonably hot for the first 3 days of Supercross. Locals were complaining about the heat, so you know it was hot!

The final few days of the week were much cooler and we got one day that started with a ton of rain, but the place bounces back pretty quickly.

Championship Saturday was perfect, or a “Chamber of Commerce day!” as Wes Kain would say. 75F and sunny. Perfect.

And I don’t know what it is, exactly, about the announcing, but I really enjoy the guys they have doing it down there. They put in long days back-to-back but always find a way to keep it entertaining and informative. Well done, gang.

Normally, we’re waiting around for the awards until well into darkness. This year, we were handing out awards by 3:30 and were done before it even got dark! I’m sure everyone will agree that it was a very welcome change.

Unfortunately, many riders didn’t stay to accept their trophies or specialty awards, and that was a bit of a shame. Check out #31 Barry Carsten on stage all by himself!

At first, you thought he had his shorts pulled way up, didn’t you? Barry Carsten is a guy who my dad would have described like this: he could drink a glass of water and get mustard on his shirt. The guy is a legend.

I’ll put up a column highlighting how our Canadians did in a post all its own, so watch for that later. I was only able to snag a couple post-race interviews because when I rode my MTB through the pits after the final moto on Saturday afternoon, the pits were a ghost town! Very few people stayed around.

#138 Dylan Rempel Interview:

#409 Brennan Schofield Interview:

I also shot video of the final 250 A moto that had Dylan Rempel, #800 Preston Masciangelo, and #50 Austin Jones in it. I have a full video to edit of #48 Jayden Riley‘s final race on the Supermini with an interview as well that I’ll get to as soon as I can.

You can take a look over the results HERE.

I made it home late last night after a long day behind the wheel. And, wouldn’t you know it, the snow started, literally, as soon as I got across the Bluewater Bridge from Port Huron, Michigan, to Sarnia, Ontario. How does it know?!

I’m feeling a little fragile today and having a hard time typing without making a lot of mistakes, so I won’t go much further here.

I made a few pitstops along the way home…Oh, I will add that on the way down, I did one of my classics. I pulled over for a short, 20-minute “nap” and woke up 7 hours later!

I decided to pull over a couple tourist traps. The one I really wanted to see was the Bigfoot Museum in Blue Ridge, Georgia. I left the highway and took the exit but then saw that it was a long way off, and had to abort the mission. Too bad. Oh, and when I tried to find this particular museum online, I noticed there are a whole slew of “museums” dedicated to Bigfoot scattered around the USA, so maybe this one wasn’t so special after all.

I wanted to use a line from National Lampoon’s Vacation so I pulled off at the next museum sign I saw, which was for the Museum of Appalacia.

“Sorry, folks, museum’s closed. The sasquach at the gate should have told you!”

And when I saw the sign for the first-ever Kentucky Fried Chicken in Corbin, KY, I had to pull in. The sign called it the “Sanders Café” so I thought I’d pull in for a cup of coffee. It turns out they have a rather loose use for the word café…

Anyway, I made it home and the #DMXVan made it there and back once again. If you’re scoring at home, I think that’ll make around 18 trips to Florida for the old girl! Talk about a good ad for the Dodge Caravan!

I’ve said this before, but hopefully that was the last time I take the van on a long road trip, but never say never! Some sort of catastrophic failure has got to be lurking somewhere under the hood.

I’ve been trying to post results from Round 2 of the AMO Arenacross Championships in Chilliwack, BC, but the results page isn’t working at the moment, so we’ll have to wait until they get that sorted out.

Here are a couple edits from the first weekend:

Friday:

Saturday:

I know #14 Quinn Amyotte took the wins both nights, so congratulations to the new WLTN Seven Kawasaki rider.

#26 Julien Benek was beaten up pretty good in a crash on Friday night, so he decided to sit out Round 2 but says he’ll be back this week for the final 2 nights:

That was an ugly one, so it’s just a good thing that wasn’t worse.

I’ll be out west looking after my mom for a couple weeks, so depending on how she’s doing, I just may show up for a few podium celebration photos and then just turn around and drive back to Kamloops. We’ll have to see how the weather and the Coquihalla Highway look before I make that decision, not to mention the attitude of my mom…

Kade Walker Injury Update

Have a great week, everyone. I can see snow falling in our backyard through my office window. What a difference a day’s driving can make!

You should see the other guy! “See you at the races...”