American Dream?
Published: 10th April 2008
Author: Words by Gordon Crockard Photo by Frank Hoppen
More like American nightmare for Gordy who’s got no visa, no salary and a poorly pussy back home…
This month has been hard to enjoy. I have to acquire a US work visa to be able to be in America to fulfil my obligations to the Scott Summers Inc. GNCC race team. I have an attorney in California filing the case for me and she's been doing that since the start of January ’08.
I won't comment on her as she's an expert in the legal department and would likely sue my ass raw but I'll let you guess what I think of her as she still hasn't got me a visa, has informed me that I don't have permission to contact her, told me if there's anything I need to know that she'll email me and for all this fabulous service I get to pay her £3500 per case. And I've two cases! Without a visa I can't receive any salary or work/race for money while in the States. I feel terrible about the whole thing and will be a different man once it's all sorted properly and I can get on with doing my job.
I moved into an apartment that I rented for the next seven months so that's cool and I bought a van so I can get around this vast country. The weather is picking up day by day here in Cincinnati and that’s important as the area is still very wet under foot and bike riding is all mud conditions still.
We're still running the Huskys and are now their official team with direct backing. A technician from Husky HQ in Italy is flying over on Monday to spend a week with the team here in the States.
I have a lot of testing to do on the Husky bike as all I've done so far is jump straight on a stock one and race it so I'm keen to make improvements immediately. They have a huge selection of models that I could race – I need to take my pick from 450TXC, 450TE, 510TXC, 510TE and also a competitive two-stroke WR250. At present I'm on a 450 TXC but I may change to another model after I get a chance to test them all.
Because of the whole visa fiasco I had to return to Northern Ireland after the second round so I was at home over Easter and was able to take part in a XC race not far from Ballynahinch in County Down. I won the race and really enjoyed being able to join a lot of my friends who were also competing. I'd love to see this type of racing grow and will contest as many of them as I can if I'm there to do so. Thanks to the club and workers who hosted the race, it was a great day.
At the last GNCC race I did I made a mistake I will never make again. It cost me any chance I had of a good result and painfully I could only recover to 13th place. I was lying fourth on the opening lap and was foolishly pushing to get to the front. I crashed and destroyed the bike and had to crawl the bike to the pit area to repair it and resume the race. If I had been more patient and rode with less urgency on the opening lap then for sure I could have had a great result. Lesson learned!
Round four is approaching and I'm eager to get up there. As long as I keep trying then things will work out. Not much other craic really other than when I was home I was out on the RIB in the Irish Sea, was BMXing on some massive trails I found, had lunch with Dougie Lampkin in Bangor when he was over promoting the up and coming world trials round to be staged there, went MTBing with Ben Reid and broke my bike and had to walk home, my cat’s really ill and I think he's got lead poisoning since a farmer shot him years ago with a shotgun, Amy's at home looking after the donkeys and I miss her and her cooking, David Knight's real name is George Shuttleworth and he's planning on forming a production line to build Shuttleworth Snap race bikes blah, blah, blah etc etc etc…