If your rooting interests were on a solely regional basis, the first day of the 2003 National Collegiate Cycling Association Road National Championships was a good day no matter what time zone you were pulling for. The breakdown of winners from the Treasure Island Criterium covered all reaches of the country, with Yale’s Marissa Kellogg, Midwestern State’s Stephanie Hannos, Colorado College’s Robbie King, and UC-Santa Cruz’s Ben Jacques-Maynes each grabbing victories on Friday in Northern California.

DII women's winner Kellogg.

Kellogg’s was the first of the day, as the cognitive-science major from the Ivy League school in Connecticut outgunned Vanderbilt’s Lauren Gaffney, taking the win on the pancake-flat, 1-mile circuit that wound its way around this former U.S. Navy outpost, which sits beneath the Bay Bridge halfway between Oakland and San Francisco.

“I was really just sitting in, hoping that it came down to a sprint,” said Kellogg, who finished the race with trickles of blood running down her right knee and elbow, the result of a mid-race mishap that took down at least a dozen riders. “I was pretty shaken up after that. It was the worst crash I’ve ever been in.”

Fortunately for Kellogg, the rest of the women’s Division II field seemed content to wait for the finish to settle the outcome as well, and the 22-year-old had more than enough gas to take the closely contested bunch sprint.

Next up was the men’s Division II race, where it was King taking top spot in another bunch sprint. The win gave the New Hampshire native, who is also a member of the Boulder-based club team GS Ciao, his second straight stars-and-stripes jersey. A year ago, racing close to home in Burlington, Vermont, King took the road-race title.

“I had a really strong team behind me today,” the 23-year-old King explained. “I got a good lead out at just the right time.”

One spot behind King was the impressive Anthony Scott from tiny Georgia Perimeter College. Despite having no teammates in the race, Scott was a player to the end, taking a flyer off the front with three laps to go that almost stuck.

Jacques-Maynes won the DI men's race.

While both DII races came down to field sprints, each of the Division I affairs were decided by far fewer combatants. In the men’s race a group of five charged away from the 150-plus-rider field near the midway point, and held their gap all the way to the finish. That selection included Jacques-Maynes, Matt Dubberley (UC-Berkeley), Florida’s Daniel Larson, Doug Ollerenshaw (Oregon State) and Midwestern State’s Bjoern Ossenbrink. Ossenbrink would eventually fade and settle for seventh, while Penn State’s Bobby Lea made a late charge to grab the fifth spot.

Up at the front it was Jacques-Maynes and Dubberley, teammates on the Sierra Nevada D3 trade team, duking it out at the finish. But it was Jacques-Maynes, second in the crit a year ago, moving up a spot for the win.

“Matt went really hard on the backside, but I think maybe it was a little too early,” Jacques-Maynes said. “He got in front of me for a second, but I came back by in the last straight and held it to the finish.”

It was the final race of the day that saw the most dominating performance, though. Following a pile-up in nearly the exact same spot as in the first women’s race, Midwestern State’s Hannos said she decided being off the front was the only safe place to be. So off she went near the halfway point, hunkering into her best time-trial position in an attempt to thwart the increasingly strong breeze that was funneling in from the San Francisco side of the bay.

“I really thought I was going to get caught because it was so windy,” admitted Hannos, 24, a native of Vancouver, British Columbia, and a former member of the Canadian national team.

There was no catching the speedy Hannos, though, as she crossed a comfortable 32 seconds ahead of second-place finisher Julia Oh of Harvard.

Racing in California moves to the east Saturday for the team time trial. Action is set to commence at 7:30 a.m. just north of Livermore on a 10.3-mile lollipop-shaped course. Check back with VeloNews.com for a full report, results and photos.

One of several pile-ups.

Race Notes
— While exact numbers were not available, paramedics on the scene said they treated and released at least 25 riders, and took three others to nearby San Francisco General Hospital. Two of those riders had suspected leg fractures, while the third had a possible broken arm. The large amount of carnage was at least partially attributable to the less-than-smooth roads that made up the six-turn course.

“We actually had the city come in and do some repairs because it was so bad,” said USA Cycling’s Matt Murphy. “These are definitely not the best roads in the world.”

— Originally the criterium was to be held near host school Cal-Berkeley’s campus, but organizers were not able to work out a conflict with city buses that run on the proposed race route, so the event was shifted to Treasure Island. The island itself was originally built for the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40, and was supposed to be the site of the San Francisco airport. That never came to pass, though, and the Navy took over the parcel during World War II because of its strategic military location.

The sailors left in 1993, turning the island over to the City of San Francisco, and now it’s an odd mix of old boarded-up barracks, a large production studio ("Nash Bridges" was filmed here) and a smattering of private residences.