Bati Metallo UCI 1.1

This weekend was going to be another one of travelling with the Backstedt Hotchilee junior boys travelling over to Beglium for another UCI 1.1 in the form of Bati Metallo on Sunday 16th April. The team for this race was; myself, Dan Coombe, Matt Burke, Joe West, and two guest riders; Euan Cameron and Joshua Sandman. As we have with both other Belgian races, we drove over on the Saturday morning, arriving at around 2 O'clock in the afternoon, before going for a short hour and a half pre-race ride/recce of the course, which this time ended up with us managing to find our way into a vets race that was taking place at the time, which gave us some good race efforts. After our ride we drove back into France to find our 'Hotel Premiere Classe' where we would be staying for the night, and after some tea of pasta and some foam roller, we headed off to bed to try and get a long night's sleep before the race as it would be well needed.

Sunday was race day, ahead of lay a 129km race starting in Pommerouel with two larger laps to the south, followed by five smaller 10km laps around Pommerouel. We knew this race was going to be hard after realising there were a number of cobbled climbs on the course, so we ensured we were the first team to the gear check, meaning we were positioned right on the bumper of the neutralising car for the whole of the neutral section which was crucial seeing as it wasn't that far in that we encountered the first of the cobbled sections. As soon as the car pulled off that was it, racing definitely began with people sticking it in the gutter from the off and trying to split up the 180-man field as quickly as possible. Then we hit the first cobbled section with the whole bunch strung out into one line, and it was chaos, with me losing one of my bottles due to bouncing out, someone infront of me snapping their chain due to a poorly timed gear shift, and people dropping back left right and centre. After cresting the hill and having a few minutes of hectic racing, I had a chance to look behind me and to my surprise, there was only maybe 100 riders left, with the rest either having mechanicals or being spat out the back of the group from the pace of the bunch going up the climbs.

Their was then a bit of rest bite before the next cobbled climb section where a few more people got dropped and then another rest bite. This occurred again a few more times before we reached Pommerouel again, where we would start five smaller laps of 10km, and when we reached these laps, there had already been a break away up the road, which we had expected to be brought back by the time we reached the laps. In the past two years, this race has finished in a bunch sprint, so that's what we had expected to happen, so none of us were going to get into a breakaway and we had planned to try and bring it down to a bunch sprint and do a lead out train for me as I was feeling really good. Soon after starting the laps, the break had about a minute on the bunch, and so Dan and Euan got in a break to try and get something to happen and for the bunch to chase down the first break, or if that didn't work then they could be in a good place with being in a break, but the bunch soon brought them back, and straight away, another rider countered their breakaway, and I sat on his wheel and it was quite a slow attack, but no one chased us down, and after being joined by two other riders, we all started pulling turns and gaining time on the bunch behind us. At this point we still had about 40km of racing left, about 40 seconds to the break ahead, and 30 seconds ahead of the main bunch. Soon after this, two of the riders with us stopped pulling turns saying they were too tired to. After shouting at them a bit, I gave up trying to get them to work with us and so it was just me and another rider pushing on the pedals.

The splits started coming down slowly in both ways, with us gaining on the break slowly, and the bunch slowly gaining on us too. With one lap to go, 9.8km left, we had about 20 seconds to the main bunch, and about 30 seconds to the breakaway ahead of us. After keeping on pushing on, with about 4km to go, I timed our gap to the front break at around 23 seconds, and it felt like we could catch them, but it wasn't meant to be, coming in to the final km with a gap still either way, and coming in to the final bend with 200m to go, I was second wheel and then after the bend I launched my sprint, beating out the other riders I was with, managing to come in ninth overall on the day, which is my best result to date, my first top ten in a UCI race, and the first top ten for Team Backstedt Hotchillee, which would have been impossible to do had Dan, Euan, Matt and Josh not been helping me out with stalling the bunch and getting in attempted breakaways so as to ensure they didn't catch us.

Huge thank you once again to Magnus and Darren for getting us into another huge race, and to all our dad's for taking us over for the weekend for a great weekend of racing. Next week we will be racing E3 Harelbeke and hopefully we can make something happen there!