I'm going to start posting some gems I've learned along the way - the idea is to promote discussion and help make your racing better, easier, whatever.

My first tip is not a tip; it's a grammar point but it should be entertaining anyway:

Commissaire - how do you pronounce that word?

I've been a commissaire for 32 years now and I have been called many things in the course of working races (- many of them not fit to post here -) but I have found that all across the country people mispronounce the word. So here is an attempt to sort it out.

Commissaire is a French word - the English language loves to help itself to words from other languages and commissaire is one of those. As such people with French heritage usually pronounce it just fine. The problem for French folks is they think it needs to be translated into English and usually they translate it to commissioner. But like all the best things in English - chances are it came from somewhere else (I can say that because I'm English!) So no translation required - commissaire is commissaire in both official languages

Commissaire is pronounced "commy -sare" only with a bit of a French flair to it!

What a commissaire is not:
Commissioner - usually a government official, or the head of a professional sports league such as the commissioner of baseball or hockey - Heaven forbid I should be mistaken for Gary Bettman!
Commisar - a Russian official -ususally associated with bad things happening and people being woken in the night and hustled off to Siberia. There are a few riders out there that the average commissaire might not mind this happening to but fortunately those days are over even in Russia.

Those are the two main things we get called - like I said the other ones are not so much mispronounciations as differences in opinions - we'll leave those for another time.

Thanks for reading -hope you got something out of this

cheers
Sheila

Ha! I thought that you first tip would have been to pedal faster!!
Glad to know that I was pronouncing it right!

PCM