Tour de Bretagne another seven day tour. It started on the Friday and finished on the Thursday and I was glad that it did. The first two stages were rather enjoyable, apart from being on the rivet a few times. It was nice and sunny and they finished in bunch sprints. The next five days were quite difficult. Every stage finished with local laps around the finishing town so the local French cycling enthusiast could come out and clap on the riders as they passed by in the normally wet conditions. 

As the race developed and days went by, a long break was eventually going to happen and on the fourth day it happened. Myself and my teammate made the group and the break took 26 minutes and that was the start of the general classification getting sorted out. The top 30 riders were all within 30 seconds of each other and the following day Benoît Poilvet managed to ride to the finish line solo and get 1:20 minute up on the other riders. With everybody still so close on the general classification the time trial was going to sort out the final positions. I was feeling pretty confident in my ability to post a good time in the time trial which was the second to last stage and hopefully get into the top five. But this was not to happen. I had a bit of a shocker and didn’t perform. I managed just to get into tenth and was 24 seconds off being in the top five. Going into the last stage I was hoping that I might be able to get away in a break but the leading two teams kept everything together until the seven uncomfortable finishing laps. The lap was a 6 kilometer circuit with a 2 kilometer climb in it with a kilometer of it being cobbled. Every lap I thought that I had good bunch position but that was never the case and I found myself chasing to get back up to the front most laps. There was only a small group left with one lap to go and Beveren had five riders in it. My teammate got a gap going into the cobble section and managed to finish 2nd with the three other riders finishing well up there and I finished just off the back of the front group and managed to keep my tenth place overall. During the week of racing we managed to pull top fives in most stages and sometimes multiple riders in the top 10. The team was strong and it seemed we were only getting better as the week went on. The guys helped me out when needed which was great, hopefully the result in the next tour can be slightly better.

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