From left to right its Kasper Linde, Michael Berling, and Chris J-J.They finished the ride a little earlier then I wanted so I spun for an extra 20 minutes and took this self portrait, but you did't really get the view of the valley behind me:
Anyway, my legs felt good during the pre race so I was hoping for good things during the race.
As it turns out I did have pretty good legs during the race and I got into a decent break soon after the start with about 8 guys including Magnus Backstedt, however some of the big British teams missed out so we kept a 10 second gap for about 20 minutes before getting caught. The break ended up going about 20 km later and we had Frederick Just in it, but there were 3 guys from Ralfa Condor and 2 from the Pinarello team. At least it gave Frederick a good excuse to sit on. After 50 km, we started the sections of small, gravel roads that makes this race exciting. Our whole team was right in the front of the race, all of us sitting in the top 15 on roads that were only wide enough for 2 or 3 cyclists and then right at the end of the first sector of gravel roads, I got a puncture. We hadn't gone super hard yet, but there were already about 40 people off the back and the caravan was stuck behind them. So I rode the flat tire for 3 minutes ( I checked my SRM) before I finally got a new wheel. I chased super hard, but eventually got stuck in one of the many groups that were coming off the back of the bunch, it had maybe 25 people in it. I tried to get them to work to chase, but they were all pretty useless. It ended up being me and one other rider who had also punctured doing all of the work for about 40 km until we caught another group of about 15. Then some guys kind of attacked one of the gravel roads and I followed them. We roated pretty well for the rest of the race and I ended up finishing 56th, 7 minutes down on the winner. It wasn't the best day for me, but at least it was a cool course, always going up and down. I'd like to come back and get my revenge sometime, I think I could have had a good day.
The rest of the team rode really well though and set up Berling to get away with one other rider to race for the win. There was a sharp right turn 175 meters before the line into a headwind sprint. Berling was second through the turn like he wanted to be, but braked too much and opened up a few meter gap on the other rider that he wasn't able to close, so he ended up second. Still, its always good to be on a podium of a UCI race for a team like us and everyone was pretty happy about it.
PS. here you can almost see me in the break, but Backstedt is too big and basically obstructs me completely: http://www.cyclingnews.com/photos.php?id=/photos/2009/apr09/rutland_melton09/CicleClassicP08
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