What We Noticed: St. Louis
April 02, 2024
Indoors again… here’s What We Noticed from St. Louis.
- Red Cross Flag Shenanigans
I understand the need to penalize riders when they jump on the red-cross flag. However, in this situation clearly the riders didn’t see it… multiple people failed to notice it… placement was awful! So what can we learn from this? Simply, the AMA needs to be better. The rule is in place for rider safety but the red-cross flag isn’t be used properly. We have had many situations all year where a rider is down in a rhythm section actually being attended to by medics and only the yellow flag is being used. We’ve had situations where a rider is down being attended to and a RED flag is used to restart the race. For some reason the red-cross flag is not used in a lot of situations… but for some reason was deemed important enough to use in a pivotal moment of the race in St. Louis when there was no downed rider or any danger at all? The red flag should not have been used in that situation, and now everyone is pissed off because riders have to be unfairly docked. If you’re going to use it, at least get rider’s attention right? They were setting themselves up for failure, and you hate to see all the docked positions. Use in-helmet comms, get more flaggers, get bigger flags…. Do something about this.
- Barcia Gonna Barcia
Jett definitely shouldn’t have cut down but that incident is very close to 100% Barcia’s fault. No other riders are going that fast and aggressively inside in that moment. You see riders cutting down all the time on the opening lap, and most of the time the rider behind them can stop in time. Barcia needs to take all responsibility for being overly aggressive and unsafe. It was a very violent collision… luckily Jett appears to be alright. For a minute there, seeing him down in pain and unable to remount made us all think that his season was over… Barcia got away with one cause it could have been a lot worse.
- Kitchen’s Title to Lose
No doubt about it now…. This guy is on fire! It’s rare to see 1-1-1 in the triple crown format because the rider NEVER needs to win that last race in order to win the overall. Kitchen feels so confidence with his race craft right now that it’s easy for him to run this pace out front. He mentioned in the press conference that the plan was to put down a few solid laps in the last race and see if RJ Hampshire should keep up with him; if not, he would have let RJ by. Clearly, RJ wasn’t able to match the pace and Kitchen goes on to dominate the night. That’s 2 rounds in a row now, and it would appear his main competitor (Hampshire) just doesn’t have the pace to beat him right now. Lots can happen still (especially with east/west races coming up), but for now this title is definitely Kitchen’s to lose.
- ELI TOMAC
Amazing to see Tomac get a win finally this year. The crowd was loving it, Eli was loving it, and even fellow riders seemed to love it (AC mentioned how awesome it was to see him get another win). Eli was fast all day, and perhaps showed in that second race that he can match Jett’s pace better than anyone else; the two of them took it to another level that no one else could quite match in St. Louis. It was reminiscent of days of old where Eli was unstoppable… (except this time Jett was still better; that’s the new norm). Eli also mentioned at the press conference that he has been dealing with an ankle injury the last few weeks which has resulted in some poor finishes. I straight up asked him what the difference was between this result and the past few weekends but he skirted the subject saying he didn’t know how to answer… finally later on he admitted to the ankle problems. These riders don’t like to use excuses but being honest helps us all understand what’s going on; Eli has had some puzzling rides in the past (perhaps more so than any other rider) and often times we don’t find out why until much later. For now though, he’s back to his winning ways!
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Old Stadium; Run-Down City
First time in St. Louis for us! And…. Not the best city to visit for a race. The only thing it has going for it is that it’s in a covered stadium (a rarity these days) and that there are some amazing breweries in the surrounding neighborhoods. Other than that, the downtown core is super run down with a lot of empty buildings (way worse than Detroit) and not many exciting restaurants downtown.
