Ok, face it, after being on the Stampede grounds a couple of times, the one thing that I just had to do at the Midway was the ride called the slingshot where you sit in a little round cage and get shot up in the air at a supposed 5 G acceleration for a second or so then fall up to 160 ft where upon you come down again rather rapidly. Here is a picture of someone at the apex of their ride when the cage turns over before they fall down. Note that you are caught like a bungee both at the top and the bottom of this ride.
So I get in the ride (and note that they have a camera in the cage and can sell you a DVD of your ride). This is me (on the left) a few frames into the launch when you are supposedly at 5Gs acceleration:
However very quickly it goes to a period of zero G which you can tell from my expression that this is what I took the ride for:
Now before I went to the Chuck Wagon races I went to an event that pitted a single cowboy on a horse against a steer that desperately wanted to return to the herd. The objective was to be able to keep the steer from going past the horse, it sounds trivial but understand that the horse and rider have to anticipate the steers move to be able to block it off. Several times I could swear the horse and the steer were just staring each other down.
Ok, the moment you are all waiting for, the Chuck Wagon races. Let me first explain that they run 9 of these a night with four wagons competing to get the best selected for the finals on the weekend. Let me next explain the rules of the race:
1. A wagon is driven by one contestant who has three outriders on separate horses who help him load up his Chuck Wagon with a stove and two tent pegs when the horn starting the race blows. The wagons then have to execute a figure 8 around two barrels before they can start racing around the nearly 1.5M track. The outriders must mount their horses and follow exactly the same route as the Chuck Wagon and must cross a line a 100 or so yards back on the track from the finish line before the Wagon they are riding for crosses the finish line. Their are time penalties for things like tent pegs that don't stay loaded, the stove not having been on the ground when the whistle blew, touching the barrels by horse or wagon, and of course for having an outrider not finish close enough to the wagon. The worst penalty is 5 seconds, but since the average race time is about 1 minute and 18 seconds even a single second penalty on an outrider touching a barrel generally means the difference between a good time and not being in the top 12. So here is a picture just before the horn with everyone ready to go:
Here is the first two wagons just starting on the nearly 1.5 Mile track. Note that the wagon in second here is the SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) one.
Here we can see all four wagons and all 12 outriders pounding for the finish line.
And here we see the SAIT wagon about to cross the finish line at 1 minute 16 seconds even. Since their time was 1 minute 16.8 if I remember correctly it was less than a second from the end. Note that there is a clock under the word "OUTDOOR" on the red banner. That one shows the leaders time without any penalties taken into account. The SAIT Wagon had no penalties in this race.
