On a cold Sunday morning of stinging squalls, along the dual carriageway south of Laurencekirk, Dooley’s Arthur Doyle successfully defended his Scottish 10 Mile TT Championships crown in 20:41 from Endura’s Evan Oliphant with 20:59 and surprise Rob Wilkins in 21:02.
Once I discovered Tay FM’s ‘Classics Sunday morning’ the trip up became less of a pain; The Proclaimers, Kraftwerk — can’t be bad.
I’ll get the moans over first; I emailed yesterday to ask for a start sheet — no reply [turns out my mail had been trapped as SPAM]; I asked the gentleman at the sign on if he had a spare one — negatory; the start sheets that the turn marshals had weren’t the same as the one the race was actually run with and neither is the one I just checked on Braveheart.
It’s not a great state of affairs for a national championship; OK, I’m back in my box.
If it wasn’t for the low cloud hanging on the foothills to the north, the stinging rain and freezing wind, it could have been an Essex drag strip — gently rolling and winding south west to a fly-over turn then retrace.
Albeit the gravel at the turn would have been brushed away at an English test — number 79 certainly wishes they’d swept it.
I managed to catch a quick snap of Evan as he launched, then headed to the turn to take pictures, cobble a report together and hopefully get some time checks.
The wind was nippy and there were cold showers blowing through; on the flyover it looked and felt as if it was classic ‘headwind out and tailwind back’ stuff, but the riders would say after the race that it wasn’t really like that, more like cross wind all the way round.
Evan’s job of getting round the turn was what you’d expect of a man who’s ridden and been well placed in two criteriums this week; high revs, fast and neat.
Although he would tell me later that if he’d had a practice run around the turn he could have taken it quicker — his style was in marked contrast to the pure testers who ground round at low revs losing time by the bucket load.
Norman Skene was a case in point, not only was he on a ‘big one’ it was a fixed gear — it looked painful as he fought the wind up over the flyover.
Number 65 was Rob Wilkins — some had him tipped for a medal but he was a handful of seconds down on Evan — maybe if he hadn’t given me that wave . . .
At this point I had to retire to the filling station to buy tissues to dry the camera and scrounge a plastic carrier bag to keep the rain off it.
Barry McGurk (Couriers) looked neat around the turn but wasn’t going to trouble Evan.
Jeremy Greengrass (Vortex), usually a man for the big gears had gone fixed for the day and looked better than most that made that choice.
Sandy Wallace was also on the single cog — presumably due of his British Masters track pursuit ambitions but was finding it a handful on that flyover.
Grinding the big fixed into the wind deadens the muscles — and then it’s hard to get the leg speed with the tail wind.
Courier’s Chris Smart was going well but not troubling Evan’s time — he was riding true and straight into the wind, unlike some, zigzagging across the tar catching more of the wind.
