Bike Races at KAUST

Greetings,

A first year on a brand new campus includes many inaugural events, with each one catering to as much of community as it can. Yesterday's bike races and family fun activities were just that, providing another "first" for KAUST. Naturally, planning and safely undertaking a day of bike races and other activities takes countless hours, but in the end, as the 120 or so kids involved finished one of the three age-group races, the smiles and looks of satisfaction provided all the evidence needed to gauge the day's success.

In truth, the day began inauspiciously. The afternoon before, a group of us had carefully placed 40 straw bales at each of the four corners on the race course, hoping to soften the crash of any errant rider by covering the base of trees, posts, hydrants inadvertently positioned to the outside of the course's corners.

As you might gather, straw isn't a huge commodity in this part of the world - indeed, I've yet to see anything remotely approaching straw growing anywhere nearby - so weeks in advance the straw had to be ordered and, given the tight security at the campus perim

eter, the truck driver hauling the bales to campus had to be escorted from the campus commercial entrance to the race venue by one of the event organizers. So, that night we left the course with significantly safer corners, now ready to complete the next big task: putting up 4 km of police tape early the next morning in order to fully secure both sides of the 2 km race loop.

Imagine our surprise the next morning when we all showed up to put up the tape to find that our carefully placed bales had all disappeared; even the loose straw had been swept away. Minutes later it was confirmed that a fastidious campus cleaning crew had come through sometime in the night and had apparently seen the stacked bales as just a larger job than usual, and now our bales were in the landfill! I quickly called a teaching colleague, arranged to have a large load of gymnastics crash pads brought over from the school, and before the first race went off the corners were safe once again.

After the races, I chanced meeting a large contingent of Chinese graduate students from KAUST. They had come for the 30 minute race for anyone 17 or older and were visibly excited about having ridden in their first race and, like true learners, were trying to soak up as much as they could about bike racing and training from the old guy. We had a short chat, during which they asked if I might ride with a group of them from time to time to help them improve their riding skills while I, noting their interest in my descriptions of the math classes at Harbor Secondary School and sure of their extensive math backgrounds as doctoral candidates in the hard sciences, eagerly invited them to join our weekly math team meetings.

As I walked slowly back to my bike, a palpable feeling of community and shared mission swept over me. About 120 kids had biked in their first bike races that day, many of them wearing a bike helmet for the first time in their lives. A modestly dressed girl with a head scarf (under a helmet!) had won the girl's division of the 13 - 16 year-old race. Not many bike races can make that claim!

Thanks for reading,

David