For the last four years, I have really enjoyed having the US Pro race weekend take place right here in Greenville, SC at the end of the summer. There had been some talk of a possible location change for next year, so I was very glad to hear for sure that the event will be coming back to Greenville for a fifth year in 2010. This year’s races were even better than I expected since local pro George Hincapie was able to pull off such an exciting win in the road race. Even more impressive is the fact that he did it with only one Columbia-HTC teammate, Craig Lewis, who had been diagnosed with swine flu earlier in the week. Craig is also a local Greenville pro, so I want to congratulate both he and George on an incredible performance yesterday in front of a very enthusiastic hometown crowd.

As I have in past years, I took quite a few photos during the races. I haven’t completely finished editing or labeling them, but I have uploaded some of my shots from each event to my Flickr account. You can see my road race shots here and time trial shots here. I also have a few pictures that I took at the pre-race press conference on Friday. One of my favorite photos from the weekend is one that I took of George and his dad right after he crossed the line yesterday to win the Stars and Stripes jersey for a third time. You can find that shot, and maybe a few of my others later, in the Pelopics section of Pez Cycling News.

Update 9/2: Pez now has a few new posts about the US Pro races, which feature a number of my photographs. See their road race coverage here, time trail coverage here, and an excellent interview with Craig Lewis here.

In addition to riding and photographing the races, I was able to spend a little time with fellow bloggers who were in town for the weekend (as well as a few who live here). Robb from Mountain Biking by 198, Josh from Pro Bike Wrench, Byron and Pam from Bike Hugger, Frank from the Tour de France blog, Olivier from the BrandBuilder, Jonathan from Low Cadence, and Kirk from Hincapie Sportswear all attended the meet-up on Saturday afternoon. We had a great time talking about cycling… and whatever else came up. It was great to see everyone and to meet a couple of people who I had previously only communicated with online.

Needless to say, I was doing more than watching the racing action over the weekend…I also was checking out all the bikes. I will save the bike talk for a future post though. For now, I need to get back to sorting through more photos from the weekend. Shooting is fun, but editing is always the hard part.