Tim G won on Sunday

Albi's New Zealander Tim G the REAL JetLag.



Sunday's race winner was New Zealander Tim Gudsell (riding for AG2R feeder team Albi Velo Sport) who had just got off the plane from Commonwealth games. Talk about JETLAG. Still I guess he must have been working pretty hard and trianing well. When you are on form you are on form. He was dropped on the last hills of the day, but found his way back to the group and is a pretty good sprinter, so he won the race in the sprint.



He did get a Bronze medal in the team persuit at the Commonwealth Games, so... good for him! A great race on little sleep. This is his first European win I believe, so I'm sure he will have gotten through a fair bit of Champaign this month.









Here is Tim on the front on his was to a Bronze medal in the Team Persuit at the recent Commonwealth Games.

the week, Hail yeah.

So sunday was nice, monday was sunny too, but I had classes etc. Tuesday was a national strike, so no classes... but it was raining on and off all day. I went out for a morning spin as someone was coming ove rin the afternoon to do some school work. I headed out for a spin, befor eI knew it it was raining on me heavilly, then I ran into one of the older guys from Cadalen who rides, and just then it started hailling.. hard too!!! My face was really hurting and I was drentched!!!! UGh

So I got home and the sun came out.. but not for long.
What a day.

Race PS

Oh yeah, our main man Julien got into the front group, attacked and was off for a solo win but was caught 10 meters from the line... he finished 7th a little dissapointed to say the least!!!

Race

Well, Sunday's race was pretty fun. I was to cover the first part of the day.. so I followed some breaks etc, just made sure we had someone in every move. I even attacked once. Not sure why, with my training (or lack there of) it was probably a bit silly, but I was an opotunity on a bit of a climb... got the field a bit strung out but it really didn't go anywhere.
Apart from the John and I were the only two to really do anything. We pulled our leader up out of the wind, then closed the gap to the main break so that he could jump across the gap at the base of a climb. It was a bit annoying because the rest of the team just sat around folloing wheels and did their own race, racing just for themselves and no one else. Luckily John and I somehow managed to finish ahead of most of them. Our aim was the get our man up front, and that's what we did. I mainly kept him out of the wind, then when we closed down the gap to the break, John but in a massive and impressive turn on the front, strung out the entire field and got everything perfectly set up for Julien (our leader) to jump across the gap without taking anyone with him.

We then formed a bit of a group of about 40 riders and rode in to the finish. I tried to controle the group so that there weren't attacks left right and center. No point "racing" at that stage, if you are so far back you need to race in a groupetto and help eachother out.

With 1k to go I was going to lead John out for our little group sprint. I hit the front, rounded a corner with about 500 meters to go and found there was a steep rise hidden behind the corner. I hit a wall and slowed down a lot. But still I think mayb 2 guys came around us, one guy took John a bit by suprise and came around him. In our group we finished 3rd and 4th I think, I'm not sure if I was 3rd or if John was... not that it really matters, the race was over by then.. but it was kind of fun.

It was a nice sunny day, so that was sweet.

Jeff Cup Mitch

PS: Mitch, I expect a full report on Jeff Cup.. well actually no, not a FULL pedal stroke by pedal stroke report, that'll get boring, but I expect to know what happened!!!!!!!! So get off your Dilbert Cubed butt and type me a report. :-)

Good luck out there mate. And to anyone else out there racing this weekend!

lots of.. stuff

What a busy week. School work is piling up... Last week I got in a nice 15hours of training (which beats the previous week's 3 hours total) and did race that new Ferrus bike. It felt pretty good. Not much to talk about race wise yet. Last weekend one of our main guys flatted, so I waited for him and helped him get back in. Sadly my race was pretty much over then and I did the rest of the race alone in a 4 or 5o man group. But I had done my job, so that's what matters. I finished in 104th place (out of 150), the rest of the team (the leaders) didn't do as well as expected, but we had a 2 or 3 guys in the top 20. Once again it was a windy race.

This week the weather has been fairly good, so despite the ever growing school work and the country wide strikes and marches against a new government law they are trying to bring in, I got in 13 odd hours of training. I'm still just mainly doing miles. I'll start doing intervals later in the year. If I hope to keep racing into November, December, January in Australia, I don't want to be fit any time soon.

JP came down and spent a few days here. He got he new team bike a couple days ago, so he built that up and we did a bit of riding.






Local frame builder Andouard leads JP (on his new bike) with Alphonce in full preparation for the MTB National Championships




















The View of Albi as we head down the hills that serround the Cathar city


Apart from that not much to say except to watch out for Scott Gibbons telling people to wear their helmets on their way to the toilet at races (Scott has joined the dark side of cycling by becoming a USCF official.) Now remember Scott.... I've put you up in my house ENDLESS times, so.. next time I'm over there, I don't care where I finish, YOU have to declair me the winner!!! Got it?!? :-)

And a final message goes out to Mitch (the only perseon who ever reads this I'm sure) who has been so hard at work he hasn't been able to surf the web. Work work work.. that's all very well, but those mountains aren't going to climb themselves Mitch (that said neither is the corporate ladder).









Mitch climbs the corporate Tourmalet

New OLD bike.

A couple of little problems have manifested themselves on my bike. So I've canibalized my TT bike and mixed a bunch of shit for this weekend. I've actually ended up with a bike that is pretty cool. The only issue is that the fork steerer tube is too short, but that's OK, I've found a solution.

Anyway I built this yesterday and will race it sunday (hmmmm.....) so I rode it a bit yesterday. Felt pretty good actually. I kind of like it. It's fairly light, nice and stiff (though it thus isn't as good in corners, that TI bike just rails it). Here's a pic.

8 days a gonna

Wow, I didn't realize it had been 8 days since my last post. Oups.

So last weekend was my first race of the season. I have mixed feelings. As I'm sure I mentioned in my previsoue posts I hadn't been feeling good on the bike for about a week. I still haven't felt good on teh bike since. So the race started OK. They moved the start forward, so I didn't get a warmup at all. Oh well. One of the big desciders of this race is a fair sized climb (a few k long) just 10k into the 100k (60 miles) race. Usually if you make it over the climb OK you'll finish in the top half. So with this being my first race I was rather nervouse and was also fairly sure I would get "dropped" (or rather not make the 1st split) on that climb. Up until the climb I did as I had been told and covered a few breaks at the front. We were to have a rider in every single break. Come the hill I felt a lot lot better than expected, so that was nice. But then repetivness of the hills and the strong cross winds took their toll. I got dropped going over the top of a hill, sat in the caravan for a while and got annoyed with one of the car that kept letting gaps open in the caravan, eventualy, after much chasing and yoyoing through the cars I got back into the race. But after a little more time I once again dropped and figured that was it for me. I quite simply am missing intervals. So I rode alone for about 30-45mins before the first chase group caught me... we rode into the finish together, did a joke sprint at the finish (joke because the race had been won 3 hours earlier) to finish in the top 50 or so. I had a case of toilet rush durring the race. It really hit about half way through. I had spent most of the morning getting intamate with the toilet and things weren't looking much better by the evening. I found out later that Francois Chulda (one of my team mates) also had some "shit" problems.

Well that's the race. I had riden a total of 3 hours all that week before the race because I had a fair bit of school work. My training is still inconsistent. The previous week I had done about 11hrs, and this week I have got in 13hrs. My training yoyos all the time. I also actually put on some weight which is a bit strange and worrying.
so monday after the race one of my classes was cancelled, so I got in 3 hours, a nice little bonus ride Tuesday (I'm usually in school all day) for a 1.5 hour sunny ride. Wed was all day of classes, thursday I got in 4 hours of riding and also got to ride with Alphonce who I hadn't seen for a while.. (I felt like shit all day, all week in fact), firday I did 2 rides and got in 2.5 hrs I think, or maybe it was 3... so I'm feeling pretty happy I got in some riding this week. Even if it doesn't show this weekend (which it won't) it's good long term.

Apart from that Darren finished 4th overall in the Giro del Capo after a "bad" time trial as he says (I thought it was rather good) where he "only" finished 6th. He also finished 4th overall int he points and took out the King of the Mountains jersey... so that was pretty sweet to follow! Good on him for that.

I haven't seen John for a while. The team asked him to stay at home as a young rider was spending the night at the team house. They've also put in a washing machine for him, which is really fucking nice of them. That's a little bit of their budget and there is a laundramat just up the street, so that'll be really sweet for him. The team is also getting him a team bike afterall, so... sweet.

I STILL haven't had my TT bars returned, so out a TT bike and I'm missing it bit time!

Ok well, that'll do for now. I have a pretty heavy school week ahead of me, so... great.

Oh yeah, one last thing... (Mitch.. GET BACK TO WORK!!!)

DArren kicks it into high gear

Cape Town South Africa.

After finishing 9th in stage1, Darren Lill kicked it into high gear over the mountainous and very VERY windy course of stage 2. Darren finished in a leading group of 5 which included 3 previouse winners of the Giro Del Capo along with 2 Tour de Langkawi winners. Darren was beaten in the uphill sprint and finished 2nd. His teammate and team leader David George (ex Barloworld, USPostal, CCCPolsat etc) finished 5th.

Darren now leads the overall Mountains Classification and is currently 2nd overall in the Giro del Capo. He will still be riding in support of David George however, so it's going to be hard for him to really prove his worth (once again). Poor Darren has seemingly spent his whole friggin' career riding for others. He so rarely gets to ride for himself that a lot of people don't realize how good he is and how much potential this joung rider has.

He'll be team leader for the Tour of China, so lets hope he can get used to the Altitude and show everyone who he really is over there. But in the meantime, who knows, there might still be the odd opotunity to ride high and well.

Darren sounded pretty pissed off about not winning stage 2. Understandable; even though finishing 2nd is pretty friggin' good. I told him he has the KoM jersey, so that's somthing to be happy about to aim for.

As I type about sunny South Africa it is bloody raining here, rained ALL dey yesterday and has been a really shitty and wet week... Hmmmm.. I can't wait until next year to be in Australia for this time of year! :-)

Giro del Capo (South Africa)

The sunny and beautifull parts of the world are giving some pretty sweet races these days. After the Australian races (Tour Down Under, Herald Sun, Geelong), and the Asian races (Tour of Taiwan, Tour de Langkawi) it is the turn of South Africa to give it's roads over to the multisolored pro peloton.

South Africa's biggest race, the UCI 2.2 Giro del Capo started yesterday. Darren Lill finished 9th in stage 1. He won this stage a few years ago and kept the leader's jersey to the end. This year however, he is riding in support of David George. Bit of a shame for Darren as he once AGAIN gives his services to another rider. When will he get to truely race for himself? Well actually fairly soon. The SA National team is putting together a team for the Tour of China, and Darren will be team leader... FINALLY!

Until then the Giro del Capo should bring us some great racing with a good international field, some stunning scenary and howfully some good results for our Lill South African Climber (or at least for his team).

boringgggg.....

Nothing much going on here. I've been in school, it's been raining.. uargh, I hate that. I can't really complain, JP had to race in that shit, and he had to do it with northern team who relish those conditions. Well there, you go. That pretty much sums the week up.

hmmmm.....

I'm back!!!

I've spent most of the week up in Castelsarrasin above Montauban at the team house, trying to help JP get settled in, and also doing some training. I've felt like shit all week though. Oh well.

I came home yesterday afternoon. I got in a nice 4 hour ride today, but still felt like shit. REally heavy. I just checked the weather and they are calling for snow tomorrow... so that's "top draw old chap".

Back to school monday, my racing season starts next sunday.
I'm tired!