Catching Up

Well, in my lack of work here a lot has been going on in the pro world as the road season hits its stride in earnest.

Let’s try and rattle through the main bits that caught my eye.

The Amgen Tour of California featured a bunch of British riders, expecting various amounts of success, whether as a super domestique in the case of Kennaugh or searching for stage wins for a newly invigorated Cavendish. The race was won overall by Peter Sagan, but Cav racked up a load of stages. The power and speed can be summed up by this video from behind the sprint:

A backseat view of @MarkCavendish's win at the @RoseBowlStadium today. #gopro pic.twitter.com/ovq0pNbpFG

— AmgenTOC (@AmgenTOC) May 18, 2015

There was also action in May in Yorkshire where Nordhaug won the race for Sky, over several days of top class racing on the tough roads of the county, but the real first view of the big names has come in Italy as the Giro is in full swing.

The early favourites were arguably Contador and Porte, and they looked to bein touch as Contador asserted his dominance, tracked by the Australian at a reasonable gap. That was all blown apart as a late puncture for Porte in stage 11 resulted in him accepting a wheel from Orica Green-Edge rider (but fellow Australian) Simon Gerrans, and compounding his losses with a 2 minute penalty for taking assistance for another team. It has been a race dogged with injuries so far, with Contador dislocating a shoulder but riding on to hold the lead so far, but Stefan Kung breaking a vertebra and clearly not continuing. There was alsoa horrific injury from stage 6 (the same crash that injured Contador).

All this followed a crash on stage 2 caused by a fixie rider trying to join the peloton. Most recently Porte withdrew from the race over the weekend after crashes that had left him injured and more than half an hour behind, leaving Contador and Aru as the main contenders to take the race by the end of this week.

In Mountain bike news there are a few things to sum up in terms of leftfield items. Maybe you’d like to see how the Downhill track at Lenzerheide is coming along for the Swiss round of the DH World cup.

Otherwise there was big news as African mountain hits the news with a qualifying race for the Olympics held in Rwanda. Hopefully we’ll see a strong contingent coming through from Africa to balance the European dominance of cross country.

While the European contingent continue to rule in that discipline the first round of the XC World Cup kicked off in the Czech Republic where Jolanda Neff, last year’s series champion won as expected with Nico Schurter getting beaten against the odds by home rider Jaroslav Kulhavý.

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