Tour of Missouri - Stage 2. Cycling seems to have changed a bit in the last few years. Races finish closer, it's harder to separate guys on time… just look at last year in the Vuelta Chihuahua where after three days over 3000m altitude with two massive climbing stages Christian finished a six day tour equal on time with the winner - the race was decided on points. As a result of the trend in 'close' racing, and I can't say I know this for sure, I think the commissaires are more prone to allocate time gaps in the field at the finish. Not like before when a group was a group and if you were in a group that sat up for a few seconds in the final 500m, well you got pack time.

That's what happened to Svein today - he got caught in a gap. 11 seconds to be exact. We'll see if tomorrow we come to regret that 11 seconds. I'll have a chat with the commissaires, review the finish film - hopefully get it changed. But it may not change.  11 seconds…

The positives today were the Andrews - Pinfold and Randell. On this exact same stage last year Andrew Randell got in the GC deciding escape and locked in an 8th place overall. Well Randers nearly did it again today - well sorta kinda. He got in the 'move' of the day. And that was our plan - be aggressive, get guys out there. We just want to be chipping away at showing we're here to race. Randell did that today being out front for 170+ kms getting caught with about 10km to go.  Then, we want Pinfold to knock out those finishes we know he's capable of and he went 3 spots better than yesterday to finish 5th today. He had a box seat for the Cavendish show.

We are very excited for tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Symmetrics Pro Cycling Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.