Tag: Tour de San Luis

The wee small hours of Wednesday morning, heading north out of Berlin, en route Rostock, the ferry across the Baltic and Denmark for the Copenhagen Six Day. I wish I could say that Berlin had an epic finale - but I can't, it was dire. Processional, flat, uninspired with no tension, no theatre, no drama.

As a web site which tries to keep its readers in touch with what’s happening on the winter boards; it’s remiss of us not to have spoken before now to Britain’s greatest ever Six Day rider – Tony Doyle, MBE. Other ‘Brits’ rode the ‘races to nowhere’ – Tony Gowland even managed to win two Six Days (off 31 starts); London (with Patrick Sercu) and Montreal with (Gianni Motta).

The fourth stage of the Tour Nivernais Morvan was the queen mountain stage, a very tough 161kms of narrow winding roads. With three major climbs each around 10km long and many short 1-3km climbs not classified a hard day was on the cards.

I wish I could get tomorrow’s Gazzetta, tomorrow – but it’ll be Saturday, at best. It was the first major shoot out, today, to Cortina d'Ampezzo. It’s over for Kreuziger and difficult for Tiralongo – a bad day for Astana. Uran continues to impress – perhaps he’ll get let off ‘train’ duties for Cav, tomorrow?

The British ‘25’ is still THE race to win - Sheil, Bonner, Engers, Lloyd, Doyle, Webster, Boardman ... Any rider would be honoured to add their name to that list. This year we’d all been expecting Matt Bottrill to add to his already impressive palmarès. But it was one of VeloVeritas' amigo, Dan Fleeman’s charges at Dig Deep Coaching who upset the form book: Ryan Perry (Langdale Lightweights RT) who’s 48:04 was 20 seconds too quick for Britain’s fastest postie.

British Cycling in the 80’s and 90's: televised Kellogg’s city centre criteriums, the Milk Race, the Nissan Tour of Ireland; and to go with Sue Ellen’s big hair and shoulder pads on the TV, those Campag Delta brakes – and then there were... Kirk Precision magnesium frames. Steve Sefton was that soldier…