News

11 June 2009

I was pretty excited and happy to be selected to race the Giro for the first time. The Cervelo TestTeam put a strong lineup together with the main focus being to support Carlos Sastre in his bid to the general classification.  My role in the team was primarily to support Carlos as much as possible in the Mountains while also covering breakaways and trying to win a stage. 

We stayed pretty quite in the first week of the race, not doing much other than keeping Carlos in a good position at the front of the bunch and conserving our energy as much as possible ready for the decisive stages that would come in the middle and later parts of the Giro. There were some really long stages in the first 10 days of the race, in one three day block we covered close to 700km!! The team was sitting nicely up until the first rest day. We had got through crash free, we had done very little work on the front of the peleton and Carlos was sitting nicely on GC, not having lost any significant time to the major contenders.

Everyone in the bunch must have recovered well on the rest day. We covered the first 100km of the 260km stage from Cuneo to Pinerolo with a 50kmp/h average!! Fortunately we slowed down a little when we got to the first climb of the day. The middle part of the Giro also included the longest toughest time trial I have ever done. It was 63km of utter torture along the Cinque Terra. There was hardly one flat km!!

After 13 stages of racing with the same focus, our morning team meeting finally changed with a shift in focus from sitting back and conserving energy to attacking and making the race as hard as possible. We were now going to start applying some pressure on Carlos’s rivals.

Stage 14. Now I finally had the green light to go up the road and get involved in the race, even if it was only to be up there waiting for Carlos if he needed me. I was super geed about this!!  I started the stage up the front and ready to go. I was able to get in the first move of the day with 5 other riders. We were going hard to try and get a good gap on the bunch when a guy from Xacobeo Galicia locked his breaks up going through a round about and nearly took us both down. Lucky for me we stayed upright and were later joined by 12 other riders. We started to work well together and with our time slowly creeping out the chase started behind and we were brought back quite quickly. As soon as we were back in the bunch, I looked around to see if any of my team mates were up there ready to go with the following move. Unfortunately the guys were out of position so I tried again when the next move went. This time it was a group of 7. We started to distance the main group when I heard a crackle over the race radio saying another 7 guys were coming across from the bunch including my team mate Philip Deignan, so I stopped working to wait for Philip and before we new it our breakaway group was 14 riders and the gap back to the peloton was 4 minutes. We settled into a good rhythm with all 14 of us doing a fair amount of work each. At this point LPR began chasing from behind hoping to set the stage win up for Di luca. At the 20km to go point, LPR had no help from the other teams and was only able to bring the break back to 2 minutes. I was pretty confident that we would stay away to the finish. Philip was the first rider to attack on the second last climb which brought the group down to 8 riders. We then continued to work hard to the bottom of the final climb. There were a couple of attacks at the bottom of the climb which I followed and was then able to ride at my own pace to take the win. It is a really thrill to add a Giro stage win to my palmas. 

Since the end of the Giro, I had 4 quite days off the bike including a day traveling to America. I am currently doing another training block in Colorado (like last year) and will be here for a total of 3 weeks. Colorado is excellent for training as you can sleep and train at a high altitude and this really works for me.

Cervelo have yet to finalise the Tour de France team. I'm on the short list and training hard for the start of the race in my home town Monaco on the 4th of July. I'll keep you all posted on my selection in the team.

Simon.

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