Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

C Y C L E N E W S • JULY 5, 2006 75 BY GORDON RITCHIE ROSTRUM OR HOSPITAL The Traveler's Tale H owever any would-be racing hack falls into the tender trap of a life spent covering two-wheeled competition around the globe, the one thing they never tell you about is the amount of traveling involved. Let's just say that economy-class globe- trotting and being in unfamiliar places cer- tainly does not make this job a strong contender for the best job in the world, as easy and straightforward as it could be. Poor us? Poor me? Not hardly, so keep your sympathy swathed in perfumed bandages for the time being, and for one more immeasurably more worthy than I. More about that later. The immediate point is that there are times when the catalog of travel disasters and molehills morphing into mountains just transcends the bizarre and make for an experience that you simply never forget. Possibly the all-time classic happened only last year, when the Scotland vs. South Africa snoring competition took place at a hotel relatively close to the venue of the inaugural Turkish GP. The fact that one Michael Scott, Cycle News Grand Prix correspondent, was crazy enough to cut our mutual traveling costs by sharing a hotel room - and his endlessly erudite and amusing view of life - with a fellow buzz-saw snorer like yours truly-singled out Turkey as one of the sea- son highlights. I'm even more glad I had Mike's opti- mism and appreciation of the absurd onboard for this trip during the event than I was going into it. The mini-disasters and low-farce start- ed early. Mike's British Airways flight was late, our tiny Fiat rent-a-car came with no fuel - and then I missed the first fuel stop. After an easy one-hour journey had become a fretful four, we arrived at the Hotel Hellhole. It was in the dock region, next to the ship breaker's yard... On the plus side (according to Mike at least), dinner was sort of edible, and car parking was strangely plentiful. We found out later that every other "European" visi- tor or race regular who had turned up had checked-in, checked out the rooms and facilities, and promptly checked out again. Mike, it seemed, was made of sterner stuff; and I, sheepish about my recent near- empty gas tank escapade, just went along. This is how Mike and I ended up as the only non-Turkish faces in a hotel populat- ed entirely by - as our unabashed tour operator told us face to face - "Turkish race marshals, but they will be leaving every morning early." Room facilities and decor were notice- able by their absence, but the phone worked and the shower did spray out water - all over the floor. But that was okay, because the hole in the floor let it drain away again. Being woken - unbidded - every morn- ing at 4:30 with the message "breakfast ready!" bellowing from the room phone, was funny the first time. Or at least I have hazy memories of Mike and I laughing across the gap between the beds about it the first time. On night two, we had a power outage in the hotel. Until the power came back on suddenly at 2 a.m. - along with all the lights in the room. The rent-a-car came out in sympathy next morning, with a dead battery. After a few huffing-and-puffing attempts to push start the errant Fiat ("keeps you young though, eh Gordo?" said Mike, as he ignored, brand-new unlit roads (with tele- phone poles in the middle of all the car- riageways!) posed a never-ending threat to life and limb, no food places were open on the one night we went into town, and all the time the rent-a-car boss was unavailable - as he was off on weekend military service, would you believe? You couldn't make it up, and believe me now, there was even more than this to contend with. So why am I telling you lot all this, other than to raise the odd chuckle at our expense - us guys with the golden entry tickets and Valentino's number on our speed dial? Okay, okay, Valentino's PA's number on our speed dial at least. Well the previous ramblings are designed to set you up to appreciate exactly what it took for a recently depart- breathlessly rolled another cigarette while leaning on the door pillar and I breathlessly semi-expired over the hood), the problem was temporarily sorted. You would have thought that would have been quite enough excitement for any one working trip. You would have been wrong. It just went on and on. In fact, that weekend is possibly still spiralling away into insipient madness somewhere in the ether right now. The rent-a-car went dud a further two times, a tooth was broken on a cheese sandwich (honest!), sundry other medical complaints were suffered, computers died at inconvenient times, airport/hotel bookings wet wrong, horrifying traffic sit- uations developed around every corner, truly inedible breakfast fare had to be ed colleague of ours, Ernest Ribe Barberan, to overcome in order to join the traveling-press corps. A proud son of Catalunya, Ernest suf- fered an aviation accident many years ago that put him in a wheelchair for too much of his adult life. To most people an acci- dent of this nature would be a kind of end, for the spirit as well as the lower limbs. For Ernest, a former engineer turned journalist, it was a beginning. The beginning of doing exactly what other traveling racing journalists do, just doing it all from a wheelchair. Needless to say, the chair was the one traveling accoutrement he could not escape from, even on his most adventur- ous journeys. As the aforementioned series of funny and unfunny mishaps prove, it takes a lot out of even the most able-bodied people to do this kind of job, even if it gives a lot of satisfaction and useful life experience right back. Ernest would have been about 50 years old when he was covering World Superbikes as well, so the natural advan- tages of youth had also been cancelled out, by the same time clock we all succumb to. An ambassador for the human spirit, Ernest was - as you may begin to appreci- ate - a real character, and one much missed. He would amaze us all by turning up in his personal car (a tiny Fiat Cinquicento the size of a Hummer's wheel arch, but evidently more reliable than the Fiats you can rent in Turkey) at races as far away as Monza or Germany. Traveling on commercial airlines was another obstacle Ernest had to over- come, but it's not quite the same as flying yourself. Ernest was, to my initial amaze- ment when I first found out, a keen microlite flyer, all despite the chair and attendant problems of getting aviation licenses in his native Spain. You can read Ernest's own words on flying at http://www.ulmeurope.com/en/z90051.h tml, to get a flavor of his matter-of-fact determination to deal with seemingly insurmountable problems in his passion to fly. And before you get the idea that Ernest was well off to be able to fly, he was a working Joe like all of us. More independently minded than independent- ly wealthy, that's for sure. After he was finally taken from his fami- ly and friends by cancer, it was only fitting that there should be a short memorial gath- ering for Ernest in the media center at the Valencia World Superbike round. Ernest's friend Gregorio Lavilla, the current British Superbike Champion, came down from his native Barcelona and, among others, he said a few words of farewell to Ernest, in the presence of his surviving family. Afterward, in a quiet moment of clari- ty, a small band of us World Superbike media regulars agreed on two things. First of all, we missed Ernest even more now that he had not merely stopped cov- ering races a couple of years ago, but had made his final journey. Second, we prom- ised each other that if any of us ever complained too loud or too often about the traveling foul-ups, the long hours away from home or any suchlike, the others would have the perfect right to mention Ernest's name to get us to see how much more difficult things could be made for us all. Call it getting things into their proper perspective; it's just one way for us to remember the remarkable Ernest Ribe. CN

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