LADIES LOVE OBSCURE RIVALRIES: HANS v. THE FIELD

by Dan Tella, draspate@indiana.edu

After making it through 4 years at Indiana University I have truly learned one thing about life: "Little 5" week(end) is the greatest college week(end) in the nation.

For those of you who don't know what The Little 500 is, it's a bike race around a quarter mile track that features exclusively Indiana University students. It lasts for two hundred laps, covering 50 miles. The race features just over 30 teams, each with 4 riders, all which have to qualify for the field. This race is so legitimately nationally recognized that cyclists actually choose to go to Indiana University just for the opportunity to participate in this event. During fraternity rush season, frats compete over the top freshman riders, doing some serious man-flirting to try to get them to represent their fraternity for years to come. Lance Armstrong called it the "coolest event I have ever attended."

I remember fall rush of my freshman year when I was rushing my soon to be fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, and the top frosh rider, Hans Arnesen came through for rush. Having been pinned as a prized prospect, he was getting more then his fair share of dude-passes before one of the older "brothers" came through the hallway and attempted to fight him. Four years later, Hans Arnesen has just won The Little 500 for Alpha Tau Omega, a rival house. That long-graduated Tommy Toughnuts from my house surely knows this, and will not soon forget. Little 5 is not your average intercollegiate sporting event.

These athletes are in tip-top shape and train throughout their collegiate careers, sacrificing many on the college traditions that all of us take for granted. Mainly, drinking. The race field features every fraternity and a few independently organized teams. The most famous of these independent teams is The Cutters because they had a 1979 Academy Award-winning movie made about them, Breaking Away. Coming up to race day the independent teams are usually heavily favored due to the fact that they are allowed to recruit talent throughout an entire college, while frats only get to choose their teams out their 100-frat-douche member pool. And this year was no exception. The two heavy favorites were the perennial powerhouses, Dodds House and The Cutters.

However, this year ATO had the top rider in the field, and arguably the field's top rider for the previous four years, the previously cited Hans Arnesen. He was head and shoulders above the rest of the field. Hans had already been named the race's Rookie of the Year in '03, MVP in '04 (the same year ATO and most of campus will argue that they got hosed so that The Cutters could win on the 25th anniversary of their inception), but still had not led his team to a Little 500 championship.

Hans had also been involved in some controversy going into this year's race. Earlier this year Hans decided to go pro in his bike racing career, which violated the Little 5 rule barring professional riders. Immediately after he made the move to become a professional rider, Indiana University lifted the ban on professional riders in the Little 500 race. Mel, Julia, got anything for me on that one?

Yet, going into the race ATO was not favored despite having the top rider in the field. ATO was very inexperienced, featuring a freshman and sophomore on their team. They also qualified 7th, which meant they had to start in the third row, behind favorites Dodds House and The Cutters.

Race Day: Every frat on campus gets loaded with the hopes of rushing the track to congratulate their riders on bringing the trophy into their house forever, or at least until their national chapter or IU kicks them off campus. Then at 2pm on Saturday afternoon, Bill Armstrong Stadium sells out for the first time all year (despite being the home field for the nation's best soccer team), and the atmosphere cannot be expressed in words. In my first three years I had never been to a race. This is a common mistake many drunken college students make at IU, and it is a mistake that they will regret. As I piled into the weak Phi Delt fan section (thanks to the awkward presence of one of our riders' rimsucker dad. I told that hillbilly that 1992 was begging for his fanny pack back, so I think he wanted to tussle), I looked around and absorbed the environment.

Most frats were smart enough to get there early enough to claim a section of seating, so the entire student section is covered in strips of guys and girls wearing their teams' letters and waving their frats' flags. Picture a soccer stadium, on a sunny spring Saturday, overflowing with drunken college students all going nuts for a single bike shared by four spandex-clad bikers. Then all of a sudden something starts, and it turns out to be the best sporting event you have ever attended. I was there when Clemens battled Wood at Wrigley for his 300th win, and at the famous Michigan v. Northwestern game when The A-Train fumbled to give NW the 54-51 victory, and this was still the greatest sporting event I have ever seen live.

The 2006 Race: ATO's strategy was obvious from the get go: Let Hans ride as many laps as he physically can. As the race developed, there were bad wrecks and bad exchanges, which Hans capitalized upon. Hans rode the first 40 laps for ATO (a move only previously attempted in the fictional movie Breaking Away), waving off his coach multiple times instead of coming in for an exchange. By the end of his run, he had already lapped the second place team. It was never a race. Hans ran 123 of his teams 200 laps, almost 31 miles. To give you an idea of how dominant that is, Phi Delts (who qualified at the same pace as ATO, putting us side by side an the race's onset) best rider rode for less than 70 laps. Watching Hans was like watching Shaq post-up a sixth grader with a clubfoot.

For the last 20 laps he enjoyed a lead that allowed near-constant coasting and fist pumping to the crowd. For the last lap he rode with no hands while giving some hand signals to his ATO cheering section. As Hans finished the race, the rest of ATO stormed the field as rival frats threw cheap elbows at them as they hopped the fence. Even though my Phi Delt team suffered two early wrecks, and was never really in the race, I remain firm in my claim that it was the best sporting event I have ever seen, containing the most dominating athletic performance I have ever seen. Hans, pro or not, my hat's off to you.