Het Volk Recap

By Jessica | Permalink |

No Comments | March 4th, 2007 | Trackback

pippo As I’m sitting here at o’dark hundred watching the Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne coverage, I thought I’d go back and review yesterday’s race. Without something to do (other than stare at the screen) I’ll probably fall asleep. Man, these early mornings (on weekends!) are brutal.

Het Volk greeted the riders with the kind of early season weather Belgium is famous for - rain and wind. I can only imagine what it’s like to ride in that (crappy), but it often makes for really interesting viewing. By the time we started watching yesterday, however, it looked like the roads were wet and it was cold, but not actively raining. There was only one cobbled section that looked particularly bad, with large puddled-potholes down either side of the narrow road and only a small ribbon of (relatively speaking) even road in the center. More than a few guys went down on that section, having touched wheels with nothing but the ground. One CSC rider (who they never identified in the coverage) looked to be more seriously hurt, lying in the grass in the fetal position - I don’t know what happened to that guy, either. Cyclingnews says that of 195 starters, only 85 finished - but they don’t list the DNFs in the finish list (I agree, it would be a bit silly, given that it was a majority of the riders who didn’t finish).

Breakaways are common during these Spring races, especially anything with a cobbled section, and Het Volk was no different. There were several attempts at breaks, but only the final one really stuck - the one with Stuart O’Grady and Juan Antonio Flecha. Tom Boonen, who had said he wanted to win the day, wasn’t able to bridge the gap, but brought Filippo Pozzato, Nick Nuyens and Baden Cooke halfway across with him. Cooke didn’t last, but the other three riders hung on as O’Grady and Flecha appeared to be working well together - we thought for sure the winner was going to come from that duo. In the end, however, either the leading pair started messing around or the second group on the road started working together better (while it’s surely a combination of the two, I think it was more of the former than the latter) and the two groups came together with about 400m to go.

Pippo Pozzato had a Milano-Sanremo flashback, figuring, “Hey, that worked out pretty well, let’s try it again!” When the two breaks caught one another, he just didn’t stop pedaling and ended up with a two second gap on 2nd place even as he crossed the finish line. Boonen grabbed 2nd, and Stuey (who looked to be powering most of the break) had to settle for 5th.

Photo by Graham Watson