Written by Eric Place of trackstah07
  
  Not long ago I celebrated my own birthday and that made me realize that I have been within the OCM family for one fifth of my life. Turning twentyseven lately and when I was in my third year in college I could never imagine that I am still part of this small world. Many things have changed but me, and my brother who joined me still enjoy it everyday.
  
  It was season twelve when I started and won my first three races. When I was fully integrated in the system it was season thirteen already and one of the things I still remember is that teams released riders, captain in their mid twenties, for the sole reason, they did not perform like they used to do. In the extreme case teams could perform a VCBM and release an entire team at once.
  One of the riders that is still in my mind is Matthis Wouters, released by nrk, a top team at the time and a great timetrial rider with 97 in TT. And only twentyfour years old.
  Picked up by a new team that was defunct after two season and a great

riders was stuck.
  
  Another great feature that I miss daily is the moment you saw you had $ 5.000 in cash you could buy a rider from the hire list. And sell him for $ 35.000 if he was great after 15 minutes. Some riders changed hands four times within a day and finally sold for almost $ 50.000 with every team got a small profit from that rider. The days of F5 were exciting.
  
  Soon we would capitalize upon the game's transfer flexibility and develop trade alliances, such as Symbiotic North American OCM Trade Relationship (SNAOTR) and the counterpart The Syndicate. The Syndicate's only goal was to interfere with SNAOTR. They were the bad guys in OCM for a small amount of time.
  
  You liked tours. That was great, we had three tours. A climbing tour, a sprint tour and an allround tour. Classics had prestige but no trophies, it was sad to see your empty prizellist.
  You scouted a great rider who was good in downhill, nobody wanted him, untill I trained a great rider for cheap and beat other

riders.
  
  Equipo Easy On DOMINATED back then, with the most inspirational group of Caribbean riders the world has ever known. Tim Johnson of Gradient Levellers was the single voice of the OCM media.
  Teams that are less present but still active. Obviously, OCM is much different now than it was then. It was AMAZING then, because it was still a rather fledgling, growing effort, and it felt incredible to "get in on the ground floor."
  
  But I love the fact that we now have trainers and tactics, I appreciate the increased tour size, and U23 is really cool despite the fact that I have not really established a credible youth system yet. We have emerged from a relatively dark period of rampant cheating and tours filling in four minutes.
  
  Basically, I will always be nostalgic about the Erskine Pettis vs. Landon Tolman days, but I want to commend Nick and the rest of the development team for a job well done.
  
  Thanks Nick, also from my brother,
  
  Eric