Yes, Flanders is on Sunday. But that doesn’t mean Saturday is a wasted day. (Especially if you’re in Portland, where the weather is effing brilliant right now - the garden is calling me…) Before we all crawl out of bed at 4am on Sunday, we’ve got Saturday’s U.S. Open Cycling Championships to contend with.

In what is being billed as the “true North American Championship,” the inaugural U.S. Open Cycling Championships are set for Saturday, April 7, in Richmond, Virginia. The 112-mile men’s race, a stop on the international UCI Americas Tour and the national USA Cycling Pro Tour, will begin in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia and follow the route along the historic Jamestown Plantations and Civil War battlefields, ending with eight 5.5-mile circuits in downtown Richmond including a brutal cobblestone climb up Libby Hill.

You can read the whole article (it’s a good lengthy one at that) from VeloNews here.

And yes, that’s what you get when you type “American flag” into Google’s image search.