Bariani (Zamora) Road Race

This race brings me back to my roots training and racing in Sacramento while I attended college. Last year this race was a windy slugfest and I was hoping for more of the same. Without wind this race could become a sprinters race. We showed up with a strong team that could do well in either situation.

I had hoped to have a short team meeting to discuss the race, but time slipped away and we had to try and make our plan during the race. Since we had nine riders we tried to always have somebody represent us in any significant break to put other teams on the defensive. I thought we did a pretty good job of this though we missed a group or two. Since Mike Hernandez has been on fire and winning races like it's going out of style we tried extra hard to make sure that he didn't get away unescorted. As it turned out though for the first 5 laps (of 6) nothing of consequence happened.

Near the beginning of the 6th lap though a group of nine riders slipped away. We had Mick Hellman in the group and though he had been sick earlier in the week he was looking very strong on this day. The problem was that one rider in nine isn't that great of a situation when you have a large strong team like we did. Ideally we would prefer to have two or even three riders in that group of nine, but Mick was the only rider who made the right move.

I pretty quickly decided that we did not want this move to succeed. But I also didn't want to chase my own team mate down! So for a while we gambled that the rest of the field would chase this group down like all of the others that preceded it. But this break had good representation from all of the stronger teams and it wasn't coming back. Finally after talking with Dean, Wyatt, Craig, Jeff and Rob we decided to do a team chase to bring them back. The initial plan was for me Wyatt and Rob to do the bulk of the chasing and leave Craig and Jeff to finish it off over the "KOM" and set up Dean for the sprint. Unfortunately we had lost Ken to a flat earlier in the lap so we only had one true sprinter.

With our concerted chase we were bringing the group back, but it was going to be touch and go. The Safeway guys were infiltrating our chase to slow it down, but we knew what they were doing and it didn't really affect us too much. Going up the KOM we were swarmed by the fresher riders in the group, but immediately after Jeff was able to get back up to Dean to get him up to the front for the sprint. Unfortunately it was just a bit too late. Jeff Paulsen of Safeway jumped out of the group at the last corner with 500 meters to go. Mick gave chase, but Jeff had too much of a gap and won with Mick in second.

In the end, we just waited too long. If we had started chasing sooner we could have had Dean sprinting for the win. Given that chance Dean could quite likely have won the race. But... we hesitated.

On the other hand Mick did great to pull off second so it's not like we can really complain.

Afterwards I rode up to Mick to apologize for chasing him down, but his only response was that he wished we had started sooner! Everybody on the team knows what it takes to win. We know who can sprint, who can climb, who can TT, etc. We all know that we have riders who can win any kind of race and that we need to work to ensure that the rider who can win on that given day is put into the position he needs to be in. We are out here having fun at the races, but we also know that getting into a four rider break and getting fourth is not he goal if we have another option that day. Some days it will all come together and work like at the Merco weekend. And some days it will be "close but no cigar". But anybody who doubts that every rider on this team isn't willing to ride themselves into the ground for their team mates is making a dangerous assumption!