This was my second race of the day, and should have been my “celebratory” roll-out as I had secured the 2/3 Red Kite Omnium overall. I was joined by Mikal Davis and Michael Kurnik, determined to fool around. But deep inside me, I wasn’t completely happy about one thing though: I hadn’t won any mass start race of the Red Kite 2/3 this season.
We all strive for one thing, train to reach one goal, and having just tasted the sweet taste of winning an hour before, I started the race with a secret ambition, get the win, if legs allowed me to do so.
After 10 minutes of racing, an attack went off and I decided to bridge. We were two riders off the front at that moment, but I didn’t want to make too much effort yet. Behind us, the peloton was chasing hard. They did caught us back, and I was at the front when my companion told me “they are back”. I turned back, and noticed an extremely stretched peloton again, and the rider who made the last effort to catch us was too happy to be able to sit on our wheels for a minute. My demons got the best of me again: I immediately counter-attacked and created a decent gap. That was 15 minutes in the race.
Here I was solo off the front, with still 45 minutes ahead of me. As I was training for a TT, I told myself “let’s just do a 20 minute interval”.
Minutes passed, I kept a constant pace and my gap grew to almost 30 seconds, thanks to the work of my two teammates in the field. As I finished my 20 minutes, well… I just had to make it a 45 minutes interval! I stayed focused the entire time, trying to be as steady as possible, staying super low in the headwind section. My gap grew to more than a minute, and with three laps to go, I saw the back of the peloton. I now had something to chase, and I was determined to catch them. I lapped the field with a lap to go, and I brought the win for TMB with a mid-pack finish!
I could not believe I had won twice the same day, and now felt worthy of winning the 2/3 omnium!!!
As always, many thanks to my teammates, and to all our sponsors!
