Never a dull moment in Guadeloupe

Another hilly stage today. Well… basically every stage here is hilly. Two laps of 76.5 km. The first part of each lap was relatively flat, followed by a hilly section with several muros coming one after another. The twisty roads meant we never approached those climbs at high speed, making them feel even harder than they actually were.

The main objective was, of course, to protect GC. At the same time, both the team and I wanted to race aggressively. These races are incredibly difficult to control and we certainly weren’t planning on giving the other teams an easy day (there was still an open bill after yesterday 😉). Plus, we wanted to go for the stage win. During the first, slightly easier, 40 km there was attack after attack. Vorarlberg seemed determined to only let a very small group go, but we kept attacking and following moves, trying to create a break with enough strength to make it to the finish.

This continued throughout the hilly section. The pace was so high that the front group often shrank to around thirty riders. After one of the hardest climbs, around km 60, a group of seven finally got a gap. I wanted to be there. The race felt chaotic enough that this could become the winning move. I was not in the best position at the bottom, so I had to dig deep to make up distance and got over the climb around tenth wheel, roughly 30m behind the front group. Then, on the steep descent that followed, I made a mistake and crashed. Fuck.

We had rain during the first part of the stage and the roads are incredibly slippery here. I chose the wrong line, couldn’t hold the corner and had to steer into the roadside, hoping to somehow keep the bike upright. I managed for about 20 metres before my front wheel hit something and I did a full 360 into the roadside. My bike slid all the way across to the other side of the road.

I jumped up, crossed the road between the descending riders and grabbed my bike. As my teammate rode past he shouted: "CHAIN!". The chain had dropped during the crash, so I was just pedalling air. One quick shift onto the small chainring and it popped back on. Looking back afterwards, my Garmin had only paused for 12 seconds. So I probably stood still for no more than 15.

I likely lost much more time over the next few kilometres. On the next climb I completely lost my rhythm and crawled up at embarrassingly low power. Eventually I caught the group containing one of my teammates, which turned out to be the second group on the road behind the nine-man break I had been trying to join. Sitting in that group gave me some time to assess the damage and, honestly, I lost a bit of morale. Crashing simply sucks. I’d lost my glasses, I was covered in dirt and for a few minutes I was mostly annoyed with myself.

On the next climb I actually got dropped from the peloton. Then, over the top, I had a little conversation with myself: “You’re going to have a much harder day riding alone behind this group than staying in it.” So I closed the gap again, stopped briefly at the doctor’s car to clean myself up and concluded the damage was limited to a few scratches despite having done a full 360. So, vamos.

The break stayed within reach because other teams kept pacing. I expected the racing to open up again in the final hilly section. It did, to some extent, although Vorarlberg did a very good job riding five-wide on the climbs to protect the break. Fair enough. They had one rider up the road who was also well placed on GC.

We still had three riders left in the peloton, including our fastest finisher, Denley. Jens and I started taking turns to close the gap. We had to be careful not to overdo it because there were still a few climbs left, but before the final climb Jens did an enormous pull and took around 30 to 40 seconds out of the break. I took over on the climb and, because we’d already reduced the gap significantly, other riders started attacking. Perfect. That only increased the pace without us having to do all the work ourselves.
Eventually, in the final kilometre, I did one last pull before the sprint trains took over. The peloton almost literally sprinted into the breakaway. P7 for Denley (second rider from the bunch).

Not quite the result we came for, but after kissing the Guadeloupean roadside, we definitely made the best out of it and tomorrow is a new day!