Sunday, April 17, 2011

TDK stage 3 Finally a good result!

I got 4th in the 3rd stage of the Tour de Korea today. It wasn't in a field sprint though. The race started off with 20km of neutral and then started with a 4km climb that was a KOM. Our climber Hyun Gil got 3rd place on the climb and managed to keep his lead in the King of the Mountains competition. I climbed a lot better than I did on Friday and managed to catch onto the lead group of about 20 on the descent. We entered a valley and no one was pulling the group when Lee Jin Ok (a 50 year old former olympic cyclist) attacked. 2 Biclo riders followed him and I thought it looked like a good break away. My team had 4 in the lead group but no one wanted to follow the attack so I attacked and bridged up to them on a small climb. After that it was over. All of the strong teams in the race were represented in the break and we worked pretty well together. The race had a few more small hills and then had a 25km long section on a causeway on the ocean which was pretty windy. We kept working well together till about 5km to go and we had about a 3 minute lead. As I usually am i was pretty tired just from being in the break for 50km so I just followed the attacks but the sprint started with about 2km to go. I faded bad with 200m to go and ended up 4th. Im still happy to have ridden well and made the break away today. My team also finished 3rd in the team classification for today. I think we will continue to ride well we have been in the top 3 teams each day and I think we can do well in the stage team classification each day. Tomorrow should be another ok stage for me. 4th is close but I still want to win a stage before the race is over!

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