Against the clock or against the wind?

We left the hotel at 10am this morning for the stage start and didn't get back to the hotel until after 6pm. Sometimes on long stage races we are not away from the hotel as long. If you consider that the stage course was only 53 kilometers, you know that we had many hours of waiting around. Riders with the closest depart teams leave the hotel together. Often this may mean that you leave the hotel and then wait around in the team vehicles for three hours either before your depart or after your depart.

Today's stage was long, much longer than the time trials that we are used to. I was tempted to claim that today was one of the longest feeling trials I had ever done, but Stage 6's in Zaragoza is still very fresh in my mind. Today's course was less windy than Zaragoza's but we still had to fight the wind and there were many times that we were riding slanted.

Most of the course was quite boring, consisting of long straight flats. It seemed easier to focus on our time trial bars than it was to look at the long stretch of road ahead. This is what my teammate Peter Farazjin was doing when he crashed. He assumed that the road continued straight ahead but when he realized that the course took a right it was too late and went down in the curve, breaking his collarbone. This happened only about three kilometers from the finish, which he managed to complete.

Like the last TT, we all watched the race on the television with David Millar thinking that for sure he had the win this time, however when Nozal was on the final kilometer we knew that David would not take the win. It was yet another dissappointment for our team, more so for David. On the flipside, Luis rode a great TT and jumped three places forward in general classification and hopes to place even better in the upcoming mountain stages.

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Time trials are not one of my favorite things - I despise them. Those of us who are not good time trialists leave the platform hoping to ride a good time trial but deep down we know that we will lose a lot of time. I kept checking my time against Millar's and when my clock hit David's time of 1hr 2min and 20 seconds, guess where I was on the course? I was still 5 and a half kilometers from the finish. After such a long time on the time trial bike your back assumes that position, and after the race everyone is walking around hunched over and complaining about their butt being sore.

I think there are a lot of us who have been surprised by Nozal. We knew from the start that he was in good form but I think that his performance continues to impress us all. His success, of course, should not entirely outshine Gonzalez De Galdeano or the many other riders who are also in impressive form and riding a spectacular race.

Bingen Fernandez Bustinza
Cofidis
Yellow Jersey Tours
www.yellowjerseytours.com

Vengavengavenga!! © Unipublic
 

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