The revived Canadian Supermoto championship held its opening round at Shannonville in May, and we took the chance to race it.
Supermoto is not what these kids do. Road racing is the year's business — MotoMini and MiniSBK, tarmac, slicks, the same circuits over and over until the lines are automatic. Supermoto asks for something adjacent but not identical, and the useful part of entering a series you are not campaigning is that nobody has any expectations, including you.
Crosby finished third in his class. The two riders who beat him were on 125s, which is worth writing down next to the result, because a third place tells you almost nothing on its own and the equipment difference tells you most of what you would want to know.
Cohen was fourth in his, having crashed. Those two facts belong in the same sentence. A fourth after going down is a rider who got back up and finished, and the alternative to a fourth like that is a DNF.
Late in the day Abel and Crosby ran a supermoto 8 class on the little bikes, and Abel came third. We did not stay for the podium. There is a version of this hobby where you build the whole day around the trophy presentation, and there is the version where you have three kids, a long drive, and a family that has to function on Monday. We have mostly made peace with being the second kind. Mostly.
The thing I keep coming back to about that weekend is that all three of them were on track in the same race, in different classes, at the same time. That has not happened often. For most of the last two seasons they have been on separate bikes at separate skill levels in separate parts of the schedule, and the day has been an exercise in logistics — one of them warming up while another is being consoled about something.
Watching the three of them go out together was the first time the whole thing looked less like three projects and more like one. I do not know how many more years that particular picture is available. Cohen is on a 190 and heading somewhere; Crosby is eight and racing 50s. The window where they are all out there in the same twenty minutes is not going to stay open forever, and it turns out that is the part I would pay for.