Well I said when I got some spare time and got bored of the old pro cycling manger I would start to write a blog to give the few people who are interested in reading it a little bit of info about how things are going.
Well to be honest things have gone pretty well so far. I arrived in France on Saturday the 21st of Feb. and by the end of the weekend I had my first win of the season! The race itself was called prix d’ouveture and it was a local one. It was 88km round a 8km circuit and I must admit the race went pretty much as prefect as a race could go. After just 500m there was a breakaway with 3 of my team in it one being Alastair. This stayed away till the last lap after a couple of the bigger teams eventually decided to pull it back. By the time I caught the break there were only about 15riders left and as soon as I caught the break I attacked with 5km to go. I managed to hold onto the lead till the end to win by about 15sec. Good times!!!
The week following I got to meet the final house mate for the year Nathan Edmondson, a first year senior who rode for Glendene the previous year. The rest of the week was basically getting lost when going out on the bike and then trying to find my way home. Then in the afternoon walking around the town in the afternoon trying to find out where all the café and food shops were. I then had my second race of the year on the weekend. This time its was a much bigger race. It was called plantel-plantel and it was a 135km race with about 160riders in. When the race started I had a sense of deju vu. The reason for this was again the famous Brittany weather was doing its best to annoy me by raining same as last week and also the race started with a very early break and guest who was in it… yep Alastair had managed again to get it the right break! This time tho it was my team making the race hard behind and eventually splitting the peleton into pieces by the 80km mark. Now we had the break in sight we pulled them in easily. Once we caught them counter attacks started going straight away. One of the counter attacks was by a certain Johan le Bon. Now most cyclist in Europe have heard of Johan le Bon and this is because he was Jr World, European and national champion last year. I was one of these people who had heard of Johan, that’s all very well and good but I didn’t have a clue what he looked like, so off he went on his own chasing down the last survivor of the breakaway, with me thinking that guy will never be able to stay away for another 40km but of course he did and he pulled round the last breakaway guy with him. So that left me fighting for the last place on the podium. After many attacks on the finishing circuit it ended up with a group of about 10 of us sprinting for 3rd . Now I still don’t really know how and where I found a sprint like I did but I managed to get on the wheel of Cedric Herve (yes Cedric Herve who was a pro last year with agritubel!) and I flew pasted him to take to the sprint and to get on the podium for the second time in a week. Good times. Again I was joined my Alastair on the podium as he has now become my official translator as my French is still shocking!!!
After what had been a very good first week it got better in the second week. It started off with me cutting another picture out of the newspaper and sticking it to our ever increasing media wall in our house. Then the next day while everyone was in their rooms getting ready for a ride, we came back into the kitchen and there was a huge posh looking cake sitting in the middle of the table! There was no sign of who it was from or where it came from, but that certainly didn’t bother us as we now had 2 days of dessert sorted! We later found out that the owner of our house had given it to us. Not bad really considering that most land lords are normally fairly harsh. Then a couple of days later we were taken around a local bakery where the owner of the house works. After a very interesting tour around the bakery we were all hoping for maybe a free sample or something like that, but we didn’t really think that we would actually get anything, but how wrong were we. We eventually came away with 3 small quiche’s, 3 delicious pizza breads, 2 pizza’s, a massive baguette and to finish it off a very posh looking box of chocolates! Then to top of the week we had an interview with the west of France paper just wanting to know a little bit about us! Another nice bit to add to our media wall.
But as with all good things it didn’t last for ever. I had my 3rd and biggest race yet. The race was called Manche Atlantique and it is the biggest classic race and Brittany. The race was certainly an eventful one, the ridicules crosswinds made some fairly interesting moments as I nearly fell of twice, but it also caused the race to split up everywhere with people just not strong enough to hold onto the wheels in front. I fell victim to this a couple of times. After chasing back on in a group one of the times with 3 Russian national squad riders driving it on on the front they suddenly decided to take us the wrong way and off course down a small road, foolishly I followed for some reason. With everyone a bit confused we eventually turned round and got back into the cars and caught up to the peleton. When the race finally did spilt due to the crosswinds I found my self in the leading group of riders with one of my French team mates and we both stayed with it to the 7 finishing laps. When we got to the finishing laps we were greeted by thousands of fans cheering us on up the steep finishing climb. The only problem was as soon as we got there the pro teams got to the front and split the field to pieces with me near the back. I did myself a nice group to get in tho. (with a few pro riders in and my old friend from last weekend Cedric Herve.) We kept the pace high and I rolled in to finish 36th with Besson Chaussures-Sojasun (Jimmy Casper’s new team) taking the first 3 places.
Since then not much has happened really. I have been the first one to become ill with the flu and had the week off missing the 2 races on the weekend.
So hopefully next time I manage to post something I will have some better or more interesting news!
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