INDY 500!

The Marriott center at BYU holds 22,000 people, LaVell Edwards stadium holds about 60 thousand, the big house at Michigan (biggest college football stadium) can boast a staggering 110,000 screaming fans, but at the Indy 500 today there was an estimated 400,000 people all there to see one race. It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. It was definitely an experience.

My roommate Whitney and I got back from church in the morning and put on wife beaters (we wanted to fit in with the crowd) and got on our bikes and drove downtown. I expected there to be more traffic for such an event as I was driving down, and then we hit it: cars for miles. We looked around and didn’t see any cops so instead of standing still in the traffic, we just hopped on the sidewalk and took off. Black people walking on the side would tell us where the cops were so we would know when to get off the sidewalk and merge back into the traffic. Kinda like the underground railroad, ha. Then Whitney just asked a cop if we could drive on the sidewalk and he said he didn’t care if we did or not. So anyways, we got a parking spot right across the street from the raceway. I love motorcycles. We got there about an hour and a half faster than our roommate Jeff Lee who drove a couple people in his car.

I tracted into a guy the day before who worked at the gates and said he would let us in for free, but we couldn’t find him, so we just snuck past a couple of the attendants. We went to the infield where it is pretty much a big party the whole race. We got some front row seats from a drunk guy who had been there since six in the morning when he learned we were from Utah and that this was our first race and so we popped out our camp chairs just in time. Everyone sang the national anthem three times and then with a with a couple of jet fighters flying over everyone started chanting ‘USA! USA!’ There was a feeling of power to look around and see hundreds of thousands of patriots yelling that you can’t quite describe. Then the green flag came up and the race was on. The track is 2.5 miles long and so there are 200 laps. We were sitting right at turn three and there were a couple of major crashers right in front of us. Check out this video on ESPN to see them. The one with the car riding the wall was crazy.

So it turns out to be about three hours long. The first 25 laps as well as the last 25 are really intense and everyone is watching the track and screaming, but in between we went around and talked to people, played bean bag toss, ate food, saw a ton of drunks, and saw a guy take the once in a year occasion to propose to his girlfriend in front of us, and she accepted. We got made fun of for drinking lemonade by a lot of people and it would make us laugh, they would say, “I like lemonade too but it’s the f**** Indy 500!” I feel like I saw more beer there than I did my entire mission in Russia. Also, I guess here you buy turkey legs, not hot dogs from concessions. They were way good though - hittle bit o dark meat.

Castroneves won the race. He was unbelievable on the last 10 laps just pulling farther and farther away from everyone. Danica Patrick was amazing. She got third – the best any women has ever done. She was way gutsy, passing people while screaming around corners at well over 200 miles per hour. She was a crowd favorite. It was an incredible race to watch.