Certainly made me chuckle. On our very first ever tri that my wife and I participated in, anything that could go wrong did go wrong. One of the best cases of Murphy’s Law ever. One of the many things was when we went thru bike tech inspection she was missing a handlebar plug and they weren’t going to let her race until we found one. Without this $2.00 plastic plug her bike wouldn’t be considered as “safe to ride”. Ran around frantically with everything else that was going wrong. First tris are stressful enough without this happening. Found one at the last moment and since her bike was then no longer dangerous with a missing handlebar plug, we did get to do our first tri together.
Another thing to note about handlebar plugs is their, seemingly, inconsistency in terms of diameter across manufacturers (and even different models by the same manufacturer!). Not that the handlebar plug market is “hot” enough to merit a standard… But I spent a good 30-45 minutes digging through buckets and buckets of plugs at my LBS looking for plugs for my Profile Design Jammer GT bars. Nothing seemed to fit but I eventually found two, albeit mismatched, plugs that worked. But then again, I can’t imagine it’s always that hard. I think just because of the fact that I had just had a race meeting and the RD scared the begeezes out of us regarding goring a hole straight through our fellow competitors and the fact that I had to turn my bike in in 3 or so hours I was doomed to work for my plugs a little.
Before my first race I was reading the rules and trying to make sure that all my equipment was in spec. At this point I hadn’t even changed a tire on my bike myself so I had no idea what a bar plug was. I asked a few friends (other newbies and swimmers) and no one knew. I ended up stopping during a ride at my lbs and asking, “Does my bike have bar ends?” The guy looked at me like I was nuts and said yes. I then asked what they were so I could check for myself. I felt kind of stupid and haven’t gone to that bike shop since.