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April: Cobbles time

Enjoyed last night's Amstel race. The last 19km was like a game of chess. We run our Tuesday night trainings like that. A few guys break away and everybody tries to real them in then a few more break away...normally only 3 left on the last lap and then it's cat and mouse. Not pulling strong enough to wear yourself out and making sure the group behind don't catch you either.

Of course we can't go as fast as the pros but this is the kind of racing we pretend we are doing.

The Russian (Ivanov?) had done this race 10 times and he thouroughly deserved a win.

I saw on the start list BBox Bouygues Telecom
31 Yukiya Arashiro (Jpn) and then realized my favorite Japanese team has disbanded...
I didn't see Yukiya in the race last night though. He came 2nd last out of those that finished but about 60 didn't finish. That's similar to how he rode in last year's Olympics. (He was the guy leading us around the Christmas Tokyo Enduro).
 
Arashiro was in the early 8-man break. The J-Sports guys utterly failed to contain their excitement, as you might imagine, but he did look like he belonged, rode strong, took his turns on the pulls. Got a lot of face time.

Interesting race, really hard to read when the decisive break would go. It wasn't clear until the last 500m or so that the 3 men would stay away. It seemed that Lotto was about to reel the group in until they ran out of gas? started playing mind games?

First time I've seen the race; nice countryside, although those roads are kind of like obstacles courses with all the kerbs and gutters and potted plants they have all over the place. Glad Schleck and Lloyd are relatively okay; didn't look good when they were strapping them into the back boards.
 
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