Margam Park is the first setting for the innaugral Epic Cymru 5 day stage race round South Wales. The race will be here for the first two and a half days before relocating to Dare Valley country park and finally returning to Margam for the finale on Wednesday. Aidan Bishop was on the ground to report on the racing action - here's what he had to say...
Turn out was good with sunshine greeting the 165 riders taking the event on this year, some coming from the USA, South Africa, Japan and, of course, all parts of the UK. The first stroke of bad fortune went to Mark Weir from the WTB-Cannondale team, landing Wednesday but waiting for their bikes until Friday, then discovering a crack in the rear end of his bike today. A spare part is on its way, but it meant he couldn’t take to the start today. First there was a briefing for the race in general, outlining what’s to come and clearing up any questions anyone may have had. With a total of 14 timed sections being totalled to give your overall time and therefore result. Within these sections will be ‘Trail King/Queen’ segments which should favour downhill riding more than uphill, today showed there will still be a good amount of uphill within them, however. So riders will be going for overall placing but will also be clocking up times in the ‘Trail King/Queen’ category also, some are choosing to sacrifice the overall in order to be fresh and solely compete for the ‘Trail King/Queen’ title.
ADVERTISEMENT
Today was prologue day, with a near 10km route, all of it timed but the last section was segregated for the trail king cat, which had a brutal climb halfway through it. Riders set off at 20sec intervals in reverse number order, the next four days you will be free to go when you want. The prologue route was a good route but absolutely brutal to try and time trial as fast you could! Up and down all the way round leaving you empty by the finish.
Robert Williams saved himself for the Trail King and has taken the lead there and Erica Moks leading the womens. In the overall Jason Moeschler and Nicky Hughes are leading the mens and womens fields respectively. I didn’t feel great today, struggling to get out of the saddle and put any power down, but I’m sitting in 15th overall and there is after all over 200km to be ridden yet! What will be a bit interesting is to see how the next four days pans out, with a wide wide range of bikes being ridden here, today definitely favoured the lighter XC set ups, we’ll see what types of bike prevail come Wednesday.
You can read more at BikeRadar.com
via BikeRadar All the latest from BikeRadar.com http://ift.tt/1fntOlB
No comments:
Post a Comment