dinsdag 4 september 2018

Stages one, two & three. You don't get anything for free.


On September 2nd, the National Day of Vietnam, we found ourselves in the city centre of Hanoi, lining up at the start of the first stage of VTV Cup Ton Hoa Sen. Today’s stage was a 1,7 km loop around the popular tourist attraction Hoan Kiem lake, which we had to circle for 30 laps. We knew it would be a fast one, probably just like two years ago. The big difference now is that everybody’s still fresh and that showed with the fact that the race ended up in a bunch sprint and an average speed of 48 km/h. 
As a team, we tried to get into breaks, but nobody got a real gap. With only 2 laps to go, we grouped up to try our hand at a real lead-out. For a bunch of guys that almost never ride together, we actually did quite well. In the end I lost the wheel of David, but was happy to see him take the win! This gave us the flying start we wanted, but also meant that the next few days our names/ numbers would be marked.

Where we got lucky with the weather on stage 1, things changed a little bit for stage 2. From the start in Hanoi it was raining cats and dogs, which made the already long 8k neutralized section not any better. When the flag dropped, attacks were flying everywhere, although I had some trouble seeing it with my glasses fogging up. 40 minutes into the race, I was still alive and even managed to get into the break of the day. With a group of 12 riders and 11 out of 12 teams represented, I thought this could be the right one to stick until the finish. At first we did get a nice gap, but apparently some teams did not have the right guy in the break so even while we covered 96 kilometers in the first two hours, the peloton caught us well before the finish line. In the final 10k, fellow Dutchman Niels (NEX-CCN) showed a supreme solo effort and managed to hold on with 37 seconds to spare. Where David scored another podium with a third place, my empty legs didn’t get me any further then 6th. Still not bad considering the hard day.

Stage 3 would bring us further south, from Thanh Hóa to Vinh along the Vietnamese coastline. At least today the rain stayed away and the sun even showed up, although this meant that the temperature also got up to nearly 38 degrees. Today it took a little longer for the break of the day to form, but then the elastic snapped big time with the gap quickly rising up to 6 minutes. Global Cycling team was well represented with David, Bob and Robbert in a group of about 18 riders, so we were quite happy to let them go. After about half an hour of chilling out, the Vietnamese teams thought it was time to organize a chase and so 5 teams started to work together, cutting the advantage of the lead group to about 3 minutes with 40k to go. It did get them quite tired though (as was Robbert, who dropped back from the break), so at that point the peloton somehow split and we rode off with another 15 to 20 guys. Again GCT was in control with Martijn, Martijn and myself making the split. As we approached the final, a group of five (with David) took the lead and held their advantage of 50 seconds over the last remnants of the break-away group. David managed to take his third podium in as many days as we rolled in a minute later for 14th place.  

So far we can’t complain about the results. However, there’s still eleven more stages to go. We know we will probably be the prey instead of the hunters now, but we will try our best to keep this up.

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