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Bad luck in the East Mids
by Tom Southam | 28/04/09
photo by Simon Gooderham http://good.zenfolio.com/
The East Midlands Cicle Classic is not so much Britain’s Paris-Roubaix, more so a really cool, and more importantly successful attempt at organising a Classic event in the UK. The comparisons with Roubaix end pretty much at the fact a lot of people puncture and everyone gets very dirty.
No in terms of races it’s more like Brittany’s Tro Bro Leon than anything else. Through gateways, onto farm tracks, lefts, rights, deceptively difficult drags, down lanes, through hamlets and villages, always out of sight – never out of mind. And every now and again seeing a bunch of annoyed dropped riders stopped at a junction looking perplexed and furious that the complex maze of lanes and their distance behind the front has literally stopped them in their tracks as we reuse the same roads in another direction.
The only thing that the East Mids Cicle Classic in fact lacks is the Piglet the winner of the Tro Bro Leon receives. I digress here a bit but a piglet is possibly the best prize I have ever seen for a race, I noted that Wolfgang Lotz had a fine looking one he had stolen from under the nose of Olaf Ludwig in a photo the other day. So a note to Colin Clews, a piglet is the only thing that could possibly make the East Mids a more coveted event.
It is rare indeed in the UK that I ever get goose bumps in a race, my own apathetic approach to British racing after years on the continent does have its downsides at times. Getting motivated for an event in North Nowhere that finishes outside a depressed concrete sports hall can be very hard to do. No such problems for the East Mids, let me tell you.
After the first sixty kilometres or so that were ran off at high speed on quite wide (and amazingly entirely closed) roads, we had eventually managed to forge a decent breakaway. With only six men to a team we had done pretty well to get half of our squad into the ten man move, given the difficulty of the upcoming terrain it was always going to be a huge advantage to have men down the road, so everyone pretty much was playing the same move. This made getting any break to go difficult, let alone one which gave us a huge numerical advantage.
As it was when I looked around and saw not only two team mates but two blokes who are genuinely my mates in the move I was pretty happy, if there were a satellite link up to Bendigo (the town Kristian, Darren and I live in Australia) the town would have been holding its breath. But there was really no need for us to think away to fans in distant places, as what the East Mids has that really sets it apart is of course a real crowd. From the busy Italian market at the start, to the huge enthusiastic barbequing lot in Owston down to the frankly packed finish straight, this race has a real atmosphere, a real crowd.
Coming into the town on section 9 or so; on the front of the break, looking like I had been down a fox hole fighting off Viet Cong, with my mates behind me and the crowd cheering and appearing through the dust. Well I pretty much got carried away and rode so fast I had no real chance of getting around the gravel bend at the top of the drag. Silly boy, but like I said it’s a rare race to conjure up that kind idiocy – in the UK at least.
Up until this about 120km point things were going swimmingly, but inevitably things are going to change in a race that is basically made as good as it is by the ‘large slice of luck’ factor. My day kind of ended in an abrupt fit of puncturing; despite the special 25mm reinforced tyres I had been dragging around on the non dirt sections. Sure enough, a slow front puncture was swiftly followed by a very flat rear right at the bottom of the Somerberg. Here I actually made the stupid mistake of pulling over from fourth wheel back in the bunch and trying to wait for a spare from the cars. It is kind of instinctive to do that but as Si tried yelling at me, carrying on and ruining the wheel to get to the pits would have been better, as I stood still for a very long time in a clouds of dirt from the other 17 cars that were drawn ahead of us in the convoy. By which time I was pretty much already relegated from a racer to a spectator, day over just like that, touts foutre en l’air.
It’s rare that bad luck in a race leaves a bad taste in my mouth but I just couldn’t shake it after pulling from this one. It’s definitely a sign of a good race when you feel so bad about not finishing. The good thing was though that we did still have two in the move that still hadn’t been reeled in by the dilapidated bunch, and right at the head of that bunch both Si and Chris were well in control of any counters that were trying to sneak across.
The break itself though soon broke apart with Lappers moving clear with two others. It was at this point, knowing Darren (and having been ruined by him in the previous week in training) that I thought we would be clinching the win. Normally when I get this feeling from Darren, he rides off 20 or so kilometres from the finish and just doesn’t slow down. Alas I think the toll of the long day in the break was just that bit too much for not just Darren but all three of the escapees. This is after all a proper race these days and not like the British races of old – the race is fastest at the end and not just a slog fest that gets progressively slower.
The fresh legs and good luck Wilko and his Danish companion possessed were too much first for Chris and Kristian, those two both losing out to punctures, and then the tiring legs of Darren and his two breakaway companions who could do nothing but watch the fresher men slip past in the final kilometres and pinch the win from under our noses.
A frustrating day sure, but an epic day and a really great race to roll up our sleeves and get involved in, the kind of race that is only good because it comes around once a year, but at the same time is such a long old wait to have to wait to get it right the next time.
As for me it only took about three bars of the first tune Gomez played at the gig I went to that night to settle my bad mood, they are on good form for their current UK tour, as I think out team finally is for our upcoming shows, I hear Lincoln is a sell out gig..
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