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The Open Aussie Champs 2009
by Tom Southam | 07/02/09

The Australian Road Race Championships; Ballarat, Victoria.

Hot and windy, or put in metaphorical terms; like riding around inside a fan assisted gas oven. Not much room to breathe. The organizer of the Australian road titles obviously doesn’t fancy a fluke winner in the green and gold jersey as the race covers 2,500m of climbing in 163km, or simply put; for every one of the sixteen 10km circuits, 4km goes uphill.

This always leads to a very World Championship style race, in that it just gets harder and harder as the pace increases until eventually the cream rise to the top and there are 20 riders left in contention. All the other riders make the most of the coffee shops along the finish straight and drown their sorrows in iced beverages.

We had obviously nominated Darren as team leader, (Darren became National Champion on this same course two years ago) and went in to the race hoping that we could expend ourselves as usefully as possible and get ‘Lappers’ into contention over the final three laps. This meant no early breaks, hard for me, no stuffing around with the mountains competition, again, hard for me and no stopping at Scott McGrory’s BBQ at the top of the climb, another major challenge for I.

We let an early six man move slip away and ride to a three minute lead, this was ok but not great as Drapac-Porsche had missed the move and had to chase. Their three riders were actually losing 50 seconds to a minute a lap on the break; something had to be done. The large proportion of good riders in the Aussie titles are individuals in pro teams, so most had no back up to call upon, this left us with two riders unable to actually win the race, so happy to commit.

Coming in to lap nine of sixteen, Kristian (in very good shape might I add) and I took up the chase. We soon found ourselves in our rhythm, cutting a minute straight out of the break and reducing the peleton by half on the climb. We continued in this fashion, with only a little assistance in the form of Columbia’s Mark Renshaw for the next 35km. Both bowing out of the race with 30 guys left in the front and the breakaway safely swallowed up with three laps to go.

The race immediatley began to fragment further, with eight riders moving clear over the climb including several of the favourites. Lappers was caught behind and instigated a counter attack that was frustratingly disorganised, and despite hanging agonizingly close could just never close the final 20 seconds needed to get him back into the front.

By a grim process of elimination on the final climb the eight leaders were whittled down to just three, with Mike Rogers and Adam Hansen from the heavyweight Columbia team up against a very fit home based boy, Pete MacDonald of Drapac–Porsche.

On the long fast run in to the finish, the Columbia boys must each have fancied themselves, or simply not liked each other. Both refusing to take the initiative to try anything, instead just watching as MacDonald rode away from them in disbelief up the finish straight to take his biggest ever win.

Lappers came in to an eventual 15th place in the group behind the fragmented breakaway. A very solid ride all round and very encouraging considering his much more long term and relaxed approach to the year.

Despite it being a painfully hard race, it was great to be back racing with both Kristian and Lappers, we’ve all been mates before we were teammates and had no trouble forming a strong cohesive unit. We all looked pretty cool in black and I’m happy to add that we, as adopted Bendigonians, also had the loudest cheers of anyone on the hill. Half of Bendigo made the two hour trip over to watch and they let us know about it too. I hope the Australian riders were worried; I would be if the loudest cheers in my National Championships were for two foreigners and an Aussie in a UK team.

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