EUROPE PODIUM 05.30.04 (8:05 am) Hi paco fans, your all never going to believe this one, I almost don’t. I got third in yesterday’s Kermis. Pretty freaking cool, I think I surprised a lot of people including myself. Apparently Fleche brought on some pretty good form. Now I have three weeks to try to win one of these things, a pretty tall order. But I have to say that I never in a million years would have thought about winning a bike race in Europe. Wow, new perspective is pretty cool. Here is how it went down. The Course The course was pretty ridiculous. One of the ones that scared me pretty good before the race got started. It was crazy, there were two sets of hacked up railroad tracks and a million corners, but the worst was a 90 deg corner off of the start finish stretch, it came off of a normal sized euro road (maybe 6 guys abreast) and funneled immediately onto a brick side street narrower than a boulder bike path, that corner proved to be dangerous with a big crash four or so laps in that would split the group, but hey I wouldn’t know I was off the front. The Break My motivation was really high to be the first guy through the first corner and keep myself out of trouble for the first four laps of the race, then reevaluate and go from there. One of my teammates had the same idea, he was third thought the first corner and I was fourth. From the gun the two of us and four others were off the start in a split that had maybe 20sec. Two laps later one of our teammates bridged, and I snapped, just started barking orders; it was really weird I am not sure I have ever taken charge like that before. I was telling the guys to go easy because the break had way too many of us, and there was no way they were going to let us go. Another lap and we had another teammate in the group, but when he bridged he brought half of Belgium with him. This kid has a hard time with teamwork so the plan was to let him do his thing at the front, have two of us helping but only doing 50%efforts, and have one guys sitting on. It went like this for a while. Every lap of the race had a prime and we were constantly at the front but missing out this one guy was even telling us not to sprint for the primes, and then I got pissed, and I plotted for a half lap of how I was going to tear his legs off in the next sprint. And I tried, I have never burned that many matches in a sprint, and no I didn’t win (second), but the sprint that we instigated gave three of us a huge gap. And we went with it, for 16 laps and almost a hundred km’s. I can say that it was one of the hardest things I have ever done in a bike race. Rotating for over 2 hours with two Belgians, one who was a national champion, and one who had at least 40lbs of muscle more than I do, pull for pull baby. It kind of fell apart with a lap and a half to go, one of them attacked and I gave it all I had to go with him and I just didn’t have the legs. Then it was like a nightmare, the other Belgian wouldn’t pull through and I was freaking out about getting caught, I wasn’t getting splits. So I put my head down for the hardest 10k of my life, and got beat in the last 300 meters. We ended up having more than a minute over a small group of 10 or so chasers. Rough but it was still about the coolest thing ever. Aftermath I was so blown out. I got huge bear hugs from two of my teammates; one of them almost crashed trying to hug me before his bike stopped moving. Johan was really happy and trying to explain that I had to clean some of the shit off my face before I went anywhere. Then these old guys came up to me, asking about the race in surprisingly good English, theorizing on how many primes I took. I had to excuse myself as I heard my name over the PA system. And I stood on my first European podium; they gave me a heavy pewter plate. Guess what the real kick in the nuts was, no one got a picture of it. Back to the car some dry clothes and a coke later, and back to the now empty podium for a couple pics, they tear these things down incredibly fast. And it was to the bar, to really see how the day went. When they handed me the envelopes I started looking through them for the ones with my number, and the guy says “no, no, all yours” what?!! I had 19 envelopes in my hand, it was crazy, and it totaled almost 200 euros. Pretty good for a mountain biker with a little engine on his first trip to Europe. Teton sent me an email the other day, he saw my results from Fleche, and he told me he was scared for when I return to CO racing. Well, I think I am starting to believe him. Check out the slideshow below. Later, paco View my slideshow!   posted by: thiyagaraj post date: 05.30.04 (7:15 am) Congrats! posted by: newbie post date: 05.30.04 (5:50 pm) Paco! You rock. That is so cool! Congratulations! :) Heather