The Progressive Puritans

What do you get when you combine:

  • The “progressive” MO of transferring taxpayer money to other progressives
  • “Progressives'” hatred of wealthy people (other than “progressive” plutocrats, naturally)
  • The “progressive” party line on women’s issues
  • The “progressive” drive to at least appear to bring a better life you’re bigger government?

I had to check this twice – but the City Pages actually has the story:   Governments, acting on “information” from “progressive” “feminist” groups  around the country,  are pouring money into sex trafficking enforcement based on absurd predictions about the nuimber of prostitutes supposedly showing up for Super Bowls:

He didn’t have to look hard for supporters. Dallas Police Sergeant Louis Felini told The Dallas Morning News that between 50,000 and 100,000 prostitutes were expected to come into town. The call for even more outrage was sounded by a study from the Dallas Women’s Foundation, which said the throng would include 38,000 underage prostitutes…Before Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona, Cindy McCain — wife of Sen. John McCain — declared the Super Bowl “the largest human-trafficking venue on the planet.” Glendale produced a lengthy public service video broadcasting the evils of the flesh trade.

But according to police, not one person was busted for prostitution-related crimes or sex trafficking in the days leading up to the game.

The results?  Nearly no arrests.

Deterrence?  Perhaps.

“Progressive” delusions about the habits, peccadillos and appetites of the wealthy (who are, let’s be honest, the only people who can ever afford to go to the Super Bowl)?  Definitely.

Oh, yeah.  Minnesota’s doing the same.  Bigly.

It’s A Start

Ted Mondale and Michelle Kelm-Helgen resigned from the Metro Sports Utilities Commission yesterday, after the corruption in the MSFC’s use of luxury skyboxes as a spiff for the Twin Cities’ DFL became to great for even the Metro old-boy-and-girl network to hush up.

Mondale and Kelm-Helgen faced cascading criticism and scrutiny since the Star Tribune reported in November that they and other MSFA commissioners hosted friends, family and well-connected DFLers at two 18-person luxury suites at the stadium during Vikings games and at several concerts. The two said the state-owned suites were needed to market the building, but an investigation by Legislative Auditor James Nobles revealed the suites were used mostly for entertainment by the MSFA commissioners and staff.

The Legislative Auditors report sounds like it’s good reading:

[Legislative Auditor James Nobles’] 100-page report faulted Kelm-Helgen and Mondale’s leadership of the MSFA, saying they had violated a core ethical principle by using public office for personal gain, by handing out free tickets, VIP parking, food and drink to friends and allies.

Combined, the two made nearly $300,000 in taxpayer-funded salaries. They oversaw construction of the $1.1 billion stadium, which was funded in part with a $498 million public subsidy.

And the saga of Michelle Kelm-Helgen, DFL grandée extraordinaire,  sounds like a “how-to” for any political glad-hander in a one-party city;

Even before the suite usage blew up, an unclear division of duties between Mondale and Kelm-Helgen became an issue. Former authority members Duane Benson and John Griffith had questioned the need for two taxpayer-funded executives in similar roles. They also raised concerns about Kelm-Helgen’s lack of collaboration.

“We were on a board that had an inability to get information,” Benson said, adding that Kelm-Helgen also refused to let the board participate in her job reviews.

Remember way back when Zygi Wilf was yanking the DFL-led Legislature and Governor Flint-Smith Dayton around, threatening to move the team if the state didn’t pony up to improve his investment for him at public expense?  And we asked – what could possibly go wrong when you entrust half a billion dollars to an bunch of unaccountable bureaucrats whose sole qualification was their DFL political connection?

Because you should remember it.

American Civilization Is Doomed, Part MCCCLVI

The good news:  the World Series drew, by modern standards, an avalanche of viewers.  While more people watched the last really really great Game 7 that I saw (1991, Twins vs. Braves), more people watched TV back then.   It was an irresistable draw; two “cursed” teams meeting, and having one of the more enjoyable World Series I can remember.

And no Yankees.

Downside:  in a culture where short-attention-span games are replacing sports in the public consciousness, it goes without saying that a lot of people who really don’t get baseball were really watching it for the first time.

Which leads to…culture shock.

This photo caused a tempest in the teapot of vacuity that is Twitter:

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The sign says “K K K” – which you know, if you grew up keeping baseball scorecards, means three strikeouts.

Right?

Bring on the tempest:

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Among many others.

And people wonder why we have a choice between a racketeer and a blowhard for President this year.

It Was 25 Years Ago Tonight

Game 7 of the 1991 series.

I was sitting kitty-corner from the Dome that night, working a night shift at KDWB. After I got off the air, I went into the conference room and watched the last couple innings with the rest of the night crew (and some of the weekday crew who wanted to be downtown if the Twins won). I think I danced on the conference table after that final out.

It’s also fun to hear the late Jack Buck calling the game. I had one of the stranger free-lance gigs of my life in 1987, holding Jack Buck’s cassette deck as he interviewed Tommy Kramer after a Vikings game.

Anyway – 25 years ago tonight was one of the most incredible nights of my life. And, I’m sure, most of yours’.

OK, enough jabbering.  For your viewing pleasure – the entire Game 7.

Farewell To Cults

Another baseball post-season is upon us.  And if you’re a Cubs fan – and they are my National League team – it’s another season to anticipate how epic this season’s choke is going to be.  Notwithstanding the fact that this season’s Cubs team is perhaps the best to ever take to Wrigley field, with the best record in baseball,  wondering what legendary exit the Cubs have planned.

It’s time to stop the “lovable losers” twaddle, says George Will:

So, all you purveyors of Cubs Gush, listen up. Referring to Wrigley Field as a “baseball cathedral” should be a flogging offense. It is just a nice little place on the North Side where men (calling major leaguers “boys of summer” should be punishable by keelhauling) work hard at a demanding and dangerous craft. And Cub fans, loyal through thin and thin, you must remember this: Your team at least won the Cold War. For years, it held spring training on Catalina Island near Los Angeles. So when a Des Moines radio sportscaster named “Dutch” Reagan went to report on them, he stopped in Hollywood for a screen test, and the Soviet Union was doomed. So there.

Fingers crossed.

Continue reading

At Least Metamucil Isn’t Doing Sports Marketing

Tor from “Torwegian” notes with disapproval the ChiSox’ new stadium:

With some corporate marketing people, you just can fix stupid or financially desperate.  Count among them White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, quoted by WGN-TV:

“We are pleased to find, in Guaranteed Rate, a new naming rights partner founded in Chicago by Chicagoans, which shares our commitment to the city and to our fans. We view this partnership as an opportunity to connect a successful Chicago business with a historic baseball franchise, and we look forward to growing this important relationship over the coming years as millions of fans enjoy White Sox baseball at Guaranteed Rate Field.”

Dumb name?  Probably – but not as dumb as the taxpayer support that went into it.

I’d happily go to “Pepto-Bismol Park”, if they and the teams’ billionaire owners did the building.

Put another way – if “Guaranteed Rate” could guarantee us a rate of 0% taxpayer subsidy, I’d swallow my pride and root for the ChiSox.

“In Your Best Interest, Peasant!”

The Midway.

I’ve lived in this neighborhood off and on for 29 years, and continuously for almost 23 years, now.

The neighborhood gets a bad rap from people who don’t know Saint Paul – which is about 95% of the population of the Metro Area.   When most of them think of the Midway – if they think about the Midway – they think University Avenue; hot and treeless in the summer, cold and wind-swept in the winter, lined with tatty big-box stores at Snelling, check cashing shops and Popeyes at Lexington, and little H’Mong, Lao, Latino, Black and African shops down by Dale and Rice that probably strike visitors from Eagan and Circle Pines and Kenwood and Crocus Hill for that matter as “sketchy and dangerous”.

The part they miss is that people live, work, play and socialize here.

Even at the McDonalds and Perkins in the huge parking lot by the Midway Center strip mall.  The two franchises are much-loathed by hipsters and pseudo-sophisticates and the entire Whole-Foods-shopping, NPR-listening, Subaru-driving, free-range-alpaca-wearing Macalester/Carlton/Saint Olaf set that sees itself as soccer fans, most of whom would likely crap a kitten if dropped into the colorful diversity of University Avenue street life that uses the two places as its social center.

It’s up by Snelling that the Saint Paul City Council gave approval yesterday to start working on building a Major League Soccer stadium, paving the way for billionaire Bill McGuire to get hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build a stadium for a sport that resonates with precisely three classes of people:

  • Immigrants – many of whom play soccer, and many of whom don’t have the money to go to a big-dollar Major League Soccer game, with the inevitably inflated ticket and concession prices.
  • entire Whole-Foods-shopping, NPR-listening, Subaru-driving, free-range-alpaca-wearing Macalester/Carlton/Saint Olaf set, with their quadrennial “pretend to give a crap about the World Cup” ritual figuring prominently on their social “see and be seen” calendars.
  • Suburban soccer families – kids and their “soccer parents”.

Do the immigrants have the money to come out and see games?  Will the hipster class do soccer for more than a year, until the “been there, done that” sets in?  Will soccer families from Blaine and Apple Valley chance coming into the city, especially given that the stadium is going to have fairy minimal parking, deliberately forcing people onto the “A Line” bus from Rosedale and the “Green Line” train from other places suburbanites hate going to?

I doubt it in all three cases.

But that isn’t stopping those who seem themselves as members of the taste-setting class from trying to tell the Midway what it really needs; no more McDonalds or Perkins.

At the thought of “6,000 people” (dream big!) crossing McDonalds’ and Perkins’ property, one sniffed:

Yeah, soccer fans are a pretty tony lot:

Sign me up for the high freaking tea concession!

But no – let not the little people and their “businesses” and “social framework” get in the way of their betters’ plans:

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Can you imagine if a Walmart proponent had tweeted any such thing?

Tradition!

If you can say one thing about “Minnesota United” – who, if all goes according to plan, will benefit from hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer largesse when they build their alleged stadium in the Midway one of these years – it’s that they’re a typical Minnesota team, through and through:

A Minnesota team?  Why yes – after leading the league in 2014 and coming in #2, MNU has dribbled down to #5 so far this season.

The Greatest

RIP Buddy Ryan:

The defensive mastermind that was, perhaps even more than Mike Ditka, behind the greatest team in the history of NFL football, Ryan had a long, long career:

Beloved by his players and hated by opposing offenses (and sometimes hated even by his own offenses), Ryan masterminded Chicago’s 46 defense that won Super Bowl XX. He later served as head coach of an Eagles team that had a great defense in its own right, and ended his coaching career as head coach of the Cardinals in 1994 and 1995.

Ryan’s 35-year career as a football coach began in 1961 as a defensive line coach with the University at Buffalo Bulls, and in 1968 he moved to the Jets, helping them win Super Bowl III. He spent two years with the Vikings in 1976 and 1977 before George Halas hired him to coach the Bears’ defense in 1978.

He and his ’85 Bears were the subject of an ESPN biopic last year; he really wasn’t looking good (and either was Jim McMahon).

But we’ll always have ’85.

Sox It To Them

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s baseball season, time for the professional complainers to start whining about sports team names.  I have a suggestion – change them all to Sox.

 Baseball teams traditionally wear tall leggings.  We already have the Red Sox and the White Sox.  Change every team to Sox.

 ROY-G-BIV won’t get you very far, there are too many teams.  That’s okay, have contests to let the fans choose their new team name, maybe something linked to their location or history.

 Atlanta – Georgia – Peach State – obviously, they become the Peach Sox.

 Phoenix – desert – they become the Hot Sox.

 San Francisco – gay rights – Fabulous Sox (team color becomes lavender).

 Texas – everything is bigger – Big Sox.

 Minnesota – Twins – identical – Matching Sox. 

 Detroit is tough.  Their water is poisoned – Dry Sox?  Their infrastructure is in ruins – Wrecked Sox?   They seek a federal bailout – Need Sox?  The town is run by Democrats – Your Sox?  Tough one.  Besides, why does a town that has no running water need a baseball team?  Move them to somewhere prosperous and call them the Silk Sox.

 Or we could just ignore the whiners and get on with life. 

  Joe Doakes

Cleveland could be the Buckskin Sox.

Made In ND

Sports are entertainment to me.  They’re something I watch, not something I live.

But watching North Dakota State dominate the FCS in recent series has been – I’m not gonna pussyfoot around – a blast.

And NDSU’s star quarterback (and new Eagle), Carson Wentz, is the nephew of a high school classmate, so I’m gonna give some homer props over this piece.

Pullquote:

You don’t get through winters with an average temperature of 12.8° without being a certain kind of tough — the cracked-skin-dried-blood kind of tough.

That toughness comes in handy in a place like North Dakota. You see, up there, jamming your numb fingers against someone’s ice-cold helmet happens every practice. Getting decked on the cement-like dirt is just how a play ends.

And here’s the thing: I love it.

Because in North Dakota, we don’t care for flash or dazzle. That’s not our game. We don’t do things the fanciest way. We do them the right way.

Going through the draft process, you find yourself answering a lot of the same questions over and over. I get it. This is basically a very long, very public job interview. But the question that seems to come up the most is one that almost makes me laugh at this point:

“Carson, coming from North Dakota, are you worried about playing against tougher competition in the NFL?”

There’s this belief that I’m at some sort of disadvantage coming into the league because of where I’m from. But if you get to know me, you’ll understand that being from North Dakota isn’t a disadvantage. Not even close. In fact, having been raised in North Dakota is probably one of my greatest strengths.

I’m rooting for him in the big show.

 

The Flying Scotsman

Just a brief diversion from politics today.

Today would have been the 80th birthday of James “Jimmy” Clark, perhaps the greatest Formula 1 driver of all time.

A big claim?  Perhaps.  There are eight drivers who’ve won more than Clarks’ 25 F1 contests;  there are others who’ve won more than his two F1 World Championship titles.   Nobody may ever dominate the sport like Michael Schumacher did in the 2000s.

Clark in his ’67 Lotus/Cosworth – one of the great engine-chassis combinations in F1 history.

But Clark was notable for a couple of things.  First, he was one of the most prominent racers at a time when an F1 race wasn’t a whole lot safer than flying a bombing mission in World War 2.  In Clark’s second F1 race, the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, two drivers were killed.  Clark was also involved in one of the most horrific accidents in modern F1 history; at the 1961 Italian Grand Prix at Monza – with its steeply banked curves that were the inspiration for the Hot Wheels tracks you may remember from your childhood – German driver Wolfgang Von Trips tangled with Clark in a turn and veered off the track, killing Trips and fifteen spectators.   So surviving long enough to win a significant number of races, much less multiple championships, was no mean feat.

It only seems like Crosstown during rush hour. Ugly crashes like these – in the days before rupture-resistant fuel tanks and full roll cages – were pretty normal fifty years ago.

Second:  Clark excelled in just about every kind of racing car imaginable: in addition to being the premiere F1 driver of his era, he won the ’64 British Touring Car championships, was a competitive Rally driver, placed in the money at Le Mans twice out of three attempts, and even drove in a NASCAR race (the 1967 American 500 at Rockingham).  He competed several times at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in an Aston Martin DBR1:

Clark in his Le Mans Aston Martin DBR1.

And, most notably, he competed in five Indy 500s; in ’64 and ’66, the cars crapped out in the first 40 laps (they were British cars, after all).  In the other three – ’63, ’65 and ’67 – he never finished below 2nd place.   He came within a whisker of winning in ’63, his rookie race, but for a controversial decision not to black-flag Parnelli Jones’s car, which was gushing oil.   He earned “Rookie of the Year” in perhaps the most specactular rookie turn in Brickyard history.

After going out with suspension failure in ’64, he came back and won in ’65, leading in 190 out of 200 laps – the first foreign-born driver to win the Memorial Day Classic since the 1910s.

Clark’s 1965 Lotus 38 – the car with which he won the ’65 Indy contest. It looks like a glorified go-kart – don’t you love that single roll bar that doesn’t even come up over the driver’s head? But this was the first car to finish the 500 miles at an average of greater than 150mph.

And while many drivers have surpassed his total wins, total points and total championships records, he holds one that can only be tied – he won 100% of the possible championship points in ’63 and ’65 (tying Alberto Ascari’s record) – and two that may he never be beaten (he held the lead in nearly 72% of the laps he raced in ’63, and he holds eight “Grand Slams”  – races where he held the pole position, won the race, and led the entire race).

How talented was he?  Most F1 drivers are as persnickety about their cars’ setups as three-star chefs are about their kitchens.  Clark was famous for jumping into cars pretty much as-is, running a few laps, and molding his style to the car’s setup, and never really changing anything.   And going on to win.

Aside from talent, the big draw with Clark – for me, at least – was that he spent pretty much his entire F1 and Indy career with one team; Lotus.

And Lotus built the most beautiful F1 cars ever.  Bar none.   Certainly compared to today’s F1 cars, which are engineering marvels that, unthinkably in ’60s terms, rarely kill their drivers, but look (and sound) like vacuum cleaners.

A moment of silence, please.

It was a time when British engineering may have been troublesome to keep running – but dammit, it looked good!  Whether it was fictional spy cars…:

You knew it was coming.

or tanks,

A British “Chieftain” tank, which served from the sixties into the early 2000s. It may have been marginally more reliable than an E-series Jaguar – but it was what a tank should look like. Modern tanks, with their squared-off Chobham armor may run and shoot rings around the Chieftan – but the Chieftain’s design says “Tank. James Tank”.

or aircraft,

A Bristol Buccaneer of the Royal Navy. That is one beautiful plane – one of many the Brits built, starting with the Spitfire, and ending about the time the Brits stopped building their own aircraft. I need to do a series on British design someday.

or prestige roadsters,

An E-series Jaguar. In its natural state – sitting still.

Clark’s dominance coincided with the great, and final (?), age of British engineering dominance.

Help Me Out Here

To:  Colgate
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Super Bowl Ad

Colgate,

So I watched the teaser for your Super Bowl spot:

I get it.  There’s big money in appealing to the altruism of the soft-core social justice warrior.  There’s a whole generation of Millennials out there who are impressed by symbols.

And I am not one of the people who “wastes” water like the guy in the ad.  I’m way too frugal for that.

But I have a question.  Several, actually:

  1. If I did leave the faucet running, what do you think would happen (other than inflating my water bill)?   Would the water disappear from the face of the earth, never to be seen again?    Of course not; it runs down the drain, through the sanitary sewer, back to sewage plant and a holding pond, where it evaporates, turning into humidity, clouds, and eventually rain or snow, falling…somewhere in the world, usually to repeat the cycle over and over and over.
  2. For that matter, what do you think happens to the water I drink?  That it disappears from the earth for good?  No – it comes back out in one form or another; #1, #2, sweat, tears, spittle, whatever.  It eventually gets back to the environment, where it evaporates and becomes humidity, clouds, fog, snow, rain, ice, glaciers, or something.  And then repeats the cycle, over and over again.
  3. You end the ad with a young, ethnically-ambiguous girl (Asian? Central American?  Briilliant casting, actually) thirstily and heart-rendingly slurping up every drop of the “wasted” water she can get her hands, literally, around.  Now, I live in a part of the world blessed with a lot of water.  My city water comes from the Mississippi River.  And any water I don’t physically consume eventually probably gets back there, or seeps down into an aquifer, or evaporates back into the atmosphere to go heaven-only-knows where.  So please tell me; if I don’t use a gallon of water, how do you propose that it gets to that little girl in Myanmar or Honduras?  Can I pack it up in a jug and send it there, with Colgate paying the freight? Will you be holding a water drive?  How is my use of water – which, between nature and a government that handles basic services with some degree of competence, is plentiful where I live – related to the availability of water in a third-world hellhole beset by banana-republic socialists, corruption and incompetence?   Can the water I don’t use be re-purposed to drowning the successive waves of dictators that have managed to make places like the little girl’s hometown short of water, even though they’re by a freaking rain forest.

Thanks in advance.

Get That Popcorn Ready

“Black Lives Matter” has announced that they intend to protest at, and attempt to block, the Twin Cities Marathon.

Let’s make sure this is clear; after months of protesting at things that the DFL elites in Kenwood and Summit Avenue revile (the Mall of America) or are outside their frame of reference (the State Fair, the Green Line during a Vikings game) or that isn’t part of their lives (or rush hour on I94 in the Midway, I35W in South Minneapolis, or Snelling Avenue), they may have finally gone a bridge too far; they’re not just inconveniencing the proles this time; they’re going to mess with one of those things of which white, upper-middle-class, MPR-listening, St. Olaf-alumniing, Volvo-driving, Whole-Foods-shopping Minnesota is most proud; an institution that is one of the A-list faces of the part of Minnesota that wants to look at the rest of the world and say “yeah, we’re a little like New York!”.

As I started thinking about writing, I got an email from a regular reader:

I’ve been minimally following the BLM plans to protest the marathon.  I know people who run the marathon who have never supported BLM, so their reaction is obviously anger.  However, secretly I kind of like that the group is finally disrupting something other than poor and working class people getting to and from work.  Especially when I read comments on Facebook that suggest the mindset of “why are you protesting us?  We support you.” to which BLM protesters respond with something like “if you support us, what have you done to make real changes?” (not exact quotes, but enough similar sentiments on the Facebook pages that [the operator of a local political discussion listserver] linked to) Liberal types who tend to think they’re helping by voting for all of the stuff that Liberals like probably are scratching their heads at that, which at least makes this protest fun to follow.

It’s more than just Schadenfreude, of course…

…although there’s plenty of that, too.

For example:  what must it be like to be Betsy Hodges or Chris Coleman, right now?  They’ve bent over 90 degrees past backwards for BLM – who, being liberal and (partly) black, they consider their electoral property – allowing them to block city streets numerous times without the protest permit every other group would need to bet, much less blocking interstate highways and mass transit over and over again.  And now – after all those favors – BLM ungratefully wants to screw with one of Hodges and Coleman’s marquee events?

Will either of them decide to “get tough”, as the eyes of the marathon-running world are on them?

But beyond that?  As the emailer pointed out – how will “progressive” Minnesota react to their own hypocrisy being sent up on a world stage?

The Love Of The Game

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When you see the headline “First Female Football Coach,” does it make you cringe?  Probably some Affirmative Action hire to please Social Justice Warriors, making the NFL more inclusive and welcoming?  A ploy, like hiring Denny “The Knee” Green to be a Black coach – he’s Black all right, but not much of a coach?

Normally, I’d agree.  But this particular woman doesn’t sound like it.

  • College rugby.
  • 14 seasons Women’s Football Alliance (full-contact, tackling football, not flag or lingerie).
  • Running Back for Texas Revolution Men’s Indoor Football team (3 carries, -1 yards rushing).
  • Two Gold Medals for Team USA in International Women’s Football.
  • Master’s in Sport Psychology and PhD in Psychology.

If she only had the academic degrees, or only had flag football experience, I’d suspect this was a publicity stunt to get the team some good PR.

But she’s actually played the game and taken hits.  She might know what she’s talking about.  And if she can teach inside linebackers to play a better game, well, that’s what coaching is all about. And who knows, maybe she’ll bring back some decorum. “When you get into the end zone, act like you’ve been there before” could apply to linebackers . . . not every tackle requires a victory dance.  Huddle up, get your head back in the game.

I might become a Cardinals fan after all.

Joe Doakes

She may have rushed for more yardage than all current Vikings running backs whose last names aren’t Swedish.

Thanks A Billion

To:  Governor Dayton, the Minnesota DFL, and just enough Republicans to make it a community embarassment
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Thanks For Nothing, Idiots

All,

We – those of us on the real right – tried to warn you.  But you were too busy gettign yoru arm twisted by Zigi Wilf, or entertaining sentimental stories about families going to Met Stadium in -25 blizzard conditions, or wiping foam from guys in helga braids off your face, to pay attention.

So pay attention now; you were wrong, and we were right, and the deal you were browbeaten into or were too stupid to know better than to oppose “crafted” to build the new Vikings stadium is one of the worst stadium deals in the US.

However, I’m sure the Downtown Brotherhood has made their thanks known.

On behalf of the rest of us?   Oh, yeah – we don’t count, except if we don’t pay our taxes on time.

That is all.

 

Disappointment

When I first saw this illustration…:

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… I thought for a brief moment that there was an event that involved bicyclists chasing after fleeing packs of terrified runners through the streets of Minneapolis.

Upon further reading, I see it’s just a duathlon.

Opportunity lost.