Well, we haven't written since stage 3 - because we got really tired from the racing. Jeez, that Columbia sandwich created a bit of a doozy of a Sh*tstorm. We've never quite seen anything like stage 4 and that put us a in a real bind. We were honestly scared to lose it all there and that put us in a position where we wanted to ride to conserve Svein's third overall. That might sound like a cop out, but third overall in a race of this scale would be huge for us and we decided to take a conservative approach to the remainder of the tour in terms of GC. And shoot for stages when the opportunity was there with Pinfold.

Stage 5 we all kind of got lucky. The right move went, Garmin let the gap open up. Then Sparkese came to the front. They had missed the move and they wanted to bring it back for Eric Baumann who was sitting high up in the points competition. They rode hard all day and we didn't have to panic. We crossed the line for another doozy of a day with an average speed over 46kph. Kelly's Canadians David Veilleux and Keven Lacombe really put on a show that day. David was fantastic in the break, really aggressive. And Keven ended the day 3rd on the stage in a dicey bunch sprint.

On stage 6 when things were looking dangerous we put some guys in the rotation with Garmin to control the gap. We knew if we rode, we might blow some guys and Svein may get isolated in the final. But we figured if we rode Garmin would likely have guys with Christian and their interests and ours were the same- contain and control. That was our gamble. And that is pretty much how it played out. Columbia came through hard in the final 16km of crosswinds. We lost all our guys. Pinner was actually still fresh at this point, but he had a flat at the worst of times. With the peleton blowing to shreds and the barrages happening in the caravan, his day was done. Svein was able to capitalize on the work being done by Christian's VDV's Garmin team mates. Svein even rode back a couple of Columbia assaults himself. But with only about 22 minutes of racing at that point he was able to manage and finished safely as Cavendish won another stage.

We woke up to miserable weather on Sunday in St. Louis. The rumor around the hotel was stage cancellation, or neutralizing the stage in terms of GC or … well you know. Everyone was tired after the hard fast rolling stages we'd had and a lot of the 'talk' was based on 'hope' not reality. The weather man said the rain and wind would blow through by noon. And sure enough when we left the hotel at noon the roads were drying and the wind wasn't as gusty. But the heavy rains had flooded part of the course. The circuit was shortened, and the officials decided not to tack on extra laps of a shortened circuit, so the the overall stage distanced was reduced as well.

The appropriate break got away, and then got caught on the last lap to setup a final sprint. Pinner got slammed around a bit and didn't have a great finish - 10th. He and we were disappointed. He was second on this stage last year and we were hoping for another podium finish to cap this tour. Svein wrapped up his tour with third overall. One of the best results in the team's history and a great way to end the season.

That's it for our season. Svein heads straight to Spain to train with Michael Barry and the YoungMan for the World's. Some of the other guys are heading to the SunTour. But officially the Tour of Missouri was the last race of 2009 for the S-team.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 8:44 pm and is filed under Missouri, Symmetrics Pro Cycling Team, The 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.