Reposted from The Prinner Posts
You never really realize how important your passport is until you don’t have it and the visa customer service rep is telling you it won’t arrive at your house until the day after you’re supposed to be on a plane to Brussels. And I knew that it didn’t matter how verbally abusive I got with the rep because they were not in the authority to walk 50 feet to sort through a stack of passports to find mine to ship it back to me. Thankfully my flight got changed from Monday to Tuesday and my passport (with visa inside in preparation for racing in China) arrived Tuesday morning as I stood anxiously at the door waiting for the FedEx truck to come pulling up my driveway.
By the time I arrived in Brussels on Wednesday morning I had had two days off the bike after a brutal two man TT during Hillsboro Roubaix (when Kim Eppin and I broke away early and rode by ourselves for 50 miles) and my legs were seriously confused as to what kind of trick I was playing on them. And then as if the jet leg and 4 hr drive to our Dutch hotel wasn’t enough (I came by myself as the team had arrived the day before), I was to start a 4 day stage race the very next day. I managed to get in a short spin that night on some awesome bike paths, which the Dutch seem to have a well-maintained network of and are indeed well used by many Dutch locals. I was enjoying my spin on one such bike path when I heard the distinct sound of a revving engine behind me and quickly realized it wasn’t a bike path, but a street, which then began making sense with all the street signs.
I woke up Thursday morning wondering what I had gotten myself into with 108 km ahead of me and 160 women at the line. One woman insisted on being all up in my area and I kept giving her the stink eye in response to her jabbing me in the butt with her brake hood. And I couldn’t even eavesdrop on anyone’s conversation as they were speaking in a language that sounded as if they were trying to expel phlegm from their throat. I began to wonder if they were even speaking a language at all or just making amusing sounds to mess with the confused looking American.
The first stage started in a town called Sellingen and took us took large laps around a 46 km loop that was comprised of flat, narrow roads, some of which were brick, and lots of unprotected sidewinds. Holland is in some ways like my hometown of South Elgin, Il, in that what it lacks in hills it makes up with the wind, and I quickly learned that being protected and in good position is essential to doing well here. The first large lap of the race was slow, bunched up, and relatively uneventful as far as tactics go, but as far as handling and technical skills go, it was chaos. My reflexes were thoroughly tested that day as I had to decelerate from 25 mph to zero, back wheel sideways, the pungent smell of brakes in the air, to stop inches from a cluttered pileup of limbs and bikes. This soon became normal (as we humans seem to have the sick ability to normalize any twisted situation we find ourselves in just for the sake of not panicking) and I was even amused after accidentally ramming my front skewer into some chick’s back wheel, after realizing my machine was okay as her spokes were flying in all directions. Alison Starnes, my teammate, took an offroad adventure into a muddy ditch early on, and Kristen McGrath (another USA member) crashed hard in a pileup, stopping a competitor’s wheel with her hamstring, leaving a burn mark the size of a baseball.
Just a few km after the start of our second lap team HTC turned up the gas at the front in a sidewind and it was RIP for about half the field, including me as I was in bad position and could do nothing as I saw the long line of guttered riders getting annihilated and shattered. My chase group of about 30 riders remained just seconds off the back of the peloton for a while, until a few key teams turned it up in the first group and disappeared out of sight. I sat in with my group for the rest of the race and finished about 2 minutes down from the peloton in the 70s place.
The next day the whole team was relieved to only have an 80 km circuit race that consisted of five laps starting in the town of Midwolda and touring around the Dutch countryside. Even though I still didn’t see much of the front of the peloton, I still managed to stay protected from the wind as I grew accustomed to the layout of the course and could predict the direction of upcoming turns (which makes a difference because you can move up quite a few places on the outside) and the angle of wind (which would determine if the field would be bunched up or guttered down the road). Surprisingly no crashes occurred in the crazy sprint finish between HTC’s Ina Teutenberg, Nederland Bloeit’s Marianne Vos, Forno D’Asolo Colavita’s Giorgia Bronzini (current road world champ), Diadora-Pasta Zara’s Shelley Olds, and AA Drink-Leontien.nl’s Kirsten Wild. I had just enough brains to stay at the back in the last 3 km (not that I probably could have gotten to the front anyway if I had wanted to) and finished in the 50s place.
The third stage’s race was to be 128 km on a course with cruel crosswinds and a narrow, windy (used in both contexts) section of road with dikes on either side (surely with alligators and sharks awaiting the person who was sure to fall in). The first sprint would be in the first 9km to be at the front when the peloton turned into this narrow bike-path like section, because only four or so women could fit across the road, and even less could actually take the twisty turns side by side. Sure enough, everyone was taking all the risks to move up as much as possible as soon as the race began; dodging light posts on sidewalks, riding offroad ‘cross style, or just simply shoving people out of the way if they weighed less. I was approximately mid-pack and continually trying to move up when we hit a left hand turn, and instead of keeping her line through the turn, one rider decided to go from being in the middle to cutting straight across about 3 people’s lines to the right hand side. I actually did not remember this until it was retold by another Canadian rider who went down and broke her collar bone, simply because it happened so fast and there was literally no time to react. I assume that I must have T-boned the rider’s back wheel as she swept across the road and did an endo over the handlebars. The good news was that my bike and body received very little of the impact; the bad news was that it was really all absorbed by my face. My next clear memory is of my head resting on the pavement, stunned from the feeling that my face was just hit by a sledgehammer. Then I saw thick, red globs of blood dripping into a puddle on the pavement and immediately went into panic mode as I felt an absence of teeth in my mouth. The USA team car finally pulled up after much of the caravan had gone by, and Jackson Stewart (the team director) jumped out and began insisting that I was okay and to stop screaming bloody murder because I might just wake up some Australians halfway around the world.
Once I was reassured that the world wasn’t indeed crashing down all around me I hopped into the medics van, somewhat relieved I would finally get to abandon this crazy race. I would later hear from multiple sources from different teams (including the Belgian National Team, which is known for its ruthless aggressive riding) that this race was quite ridiculous in how dangerous everyone was riding and all the risks people were taking, as if they were fully willing to crash in their attempt at positioning. This may have been due to the sheer flatness of the course and that there were few hills to really splinter the peloton, or because it was the race’s debut year and the idea of going down in history as the first woman to ever win this race was truly a savory dream.
Team USA finished the race with five out of the six who started having crashed during the course of four days. Luckily, four of the five crashes weren’t serious and all but one rider on the team got to finish the race. I hate to be the one to set that one-sixth abandonment rate.
Whatever the case, I’m hoping that my upcoming one-day race feels considerably less hazardous in comparison. I also just got my teeth repaired at the Dutch dentist. They didn’t have the Olympic ring grills that I wanted, so I had to go with the conventional white tooth deal.
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