23 May 11
DC 2011
On Saturday was the Davis Double CeIntury, the epic 200-mile cycling event now in its 42nd annual edition. As we have done for the past several years we helped out by providing radio support for the event. I worked all day at start/finish helping to operate the radio net control, and Pica drove the course as a sag support vehicle (SAG 10). (If anyone can provide a convincing etymology for the use of the word “sag” in cycling, we would be quite interested.) The weather was quite pleasant for the event (partly cloudy with a high around 80 degrees, and the riders seemed to fare better than usual as a result.
At left is a sketch of our Honda Element tricked out with ham antennas for the event, a dual-band 2 meter/440 Mhz antenna for voice communications, and a smaller 2 meter antenna for the GPS radio tracker.
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Nellie! Glad to see she’s ageing well.
derivation of sag:
“SAG” (most commonly written in all uppercase in the United States but without capitals elsewhere) comes from a 1930s British expression about riders “sagging” off the back of a group.[citation needed] It was adopted in the 1940s when road-racing restarted in Great Britain to mean a following vehicle into which riders sagged when the effort became too much and they dropped out a race. SAG is sometimes described as an acronym for ‘support and gear’, ‘gear’ referring to: mechanical support.