Seven days, a prologue, and seven road stages telling over 1100km. It was a 7km hit out on the Monday afternoon, we rode the course in the morning and it looked like it was going to be a good race course. It had a few corners and round-a-bouts to get round but nothing to serious until the road got wet, I had some track tyres on so it made it a bit sketchy so my time wasn’t on the ball. Even though I didn't manage to crack the top 10, I still got to bust out the New Zealand Champions skinsuit
The next morning was the first road stage of 195km. It was the start of the scrapping for wheels and gutter riding for the week. Everyday was like it even when the break up the road had a few minutes, you were still scrapping for position in the peleton. During this race there was something always going on, if you weren’t fighting for position it was raining or someone had just crashed so the peleton settled down a bit or you had to be lapping it out on the front so you didn’t get dropped in the cross wind or you were watching the gutter to make sure there was still road in front of you so you weren’t riding in the gravel or you had a flat tyre and were getting a wheel change, it was a busy race to be racing.
Most of the stages finished in bunch sprints and the team had a go in most of them. On the longest stage of the tour 210km I got in the move and managed to finish 8th. There was a group of 18 riders in the break and with 80km to go three Russians and a Latvian got away and managed to ride to the finish taking the top spots, then it was myself in a group of four with the rest of the break coming in just behind us, I’m not to sure how the front group did it but it was a good effort on their behalf to hold off the remainder of the break.
The tour covered heaps of ground and I stayed in some neat wee towns. One of the towns was on the coast and it had heaps of old buildings still standing from the war, it was cool to see some different things.
The last day of the tour was only 150km which I was stoked about but I still had to get over a 13% climb. When my legs didn’t want to climb the stairs back up to my room after breakfast that morning I thought I was going to be in for a hard day, lucky for me the first hour was mostly downhill and my legs started to feel a bit better and I just got over the climb with the front riders. My teammate was in the break that day and he was unlucky with how the race turned out. He was up the road most of the day only to get caught with 1200meters to go.
I arrived back at the apartment at 11 after 5hrs of driving, and it was safe to say that I’m rather wrecked and am not going to be doing too much over the next few days. The tour ended ok, the team got a few top tens in the stages and I managed an 17th overall after missing a few moves throughout the week and 6th on the young rider classification. Out of the 120 riders that started this tour only 58 finished and I think only 2 or 3 teams finished with 6 riders.
