The very first event for le tour de l'Abitibi was the 400 meter prologue through downtown Val-d'Or. It was pretty intense with the fans about 3 to 4 people deep and everybody gets really into it. The whole stretch is fenced off and they bang on it with their hands, so it gets pretty loud as you come closer to the finish.
They set you up at the old church (2 blocks from City Hall where the finish is) with one rider who you get to sprint against, so it's kinda weird warming up for an hour just for a 20 second effort, but the experience was worth it. The guy I went up against was an American from the Mid-South Development Team. The dude was huge. We got up on the start house and got count down from 1:00. There were lasers at the bottom of the ramp that started the clock, so you could get away with going at 1 instead of zero. I beat Goliath for the start and down the ramp, but he really started hammering for the home stretch and pretty much blew by me. It was like trying to cover a freaking horse. I was like 4 bike lengths behind him at the finish and felt pretty lame as I'm not much of a sprinter.I got beaten pretty bad so that was crappy, but looking at the results later on that night I saw that Sasquatch got top 15 so it made me feel a little bit better.
Our team did OK I guess, only two of our guys beat the competing sprinters while everyone else got beaten. I ended up second to last out of the team so I was the water boy the next day seeing as our last place rider wasn't really experienced and didn't feel comfortable going back to the car to get water and trying to move through the field looking for team-mates. It's pretty funny too because I finished the best overall out of our team after the race was done.
micah
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