Today I’ll be making my journey to Adelaide. I wish I could have been there last night to see Hendo take such an exciting win in the crit last night.
If you haven’t’ noticed yet there’s a Twitter feed in the right column of this page underneath the sponsor’s ads. This is a feed of all the cyclists and teams racing in the TdU. Follow this feed and you’ll be getting a variety of TdU news directly from the source faster than the speed of Hendo’s sprint.
Since I’ll be in the car all day I thought I’d leave you with this video. I thought I’d post it since there’s so much talk from Lance Armstrong about doing the Worlds next year and how he’d like to see the course. Well here it is!
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While we were racing in the Bay Crits in Geelong a couple of weeks ago Koen de Kort, Kris de Tymmsy, Tiffany Cromwell and myself decided to do a couple of laps of the Melbourne 2010 World Championship course.
HD helmet cam courtesy of Race Day Rush.
See Garmin maps and profile here (press the “play” button)
It took us about 45mins of easy pedaling (except for the hills) to complete one lap of the course. I cut much of the boring stuff out of the video but made sure I kept in every turn, roundabout, climb, descent or anything else that might be of interest. This got it down to a manageable 15min.
For those of you reading who are unfamiliar with the area, Geelong is a small city about 85km SW of Melbourne. The riders start in the center of Melbourne, ride an uneventful flat journey (unless there’s crosswinds) 85km towards Geelong (see map below).
Once the riders hit Geelong, they’ll have to do multiple laps of the 16km circuit. The elite men will do 11 laps (259.9km total), the U23 men 10 laps (159km total), and the elite women will do 8 laps (127.2km total).
map of course where the video was shot
You can find heaps more useful info on the official website.
The elite men will have to do a total of about 3000m of climbing. The Mendrisio course featured about 4750 meters of climbing. Not that this means much because it’s the gradient of the climbs in Geelong that are going to make it tough for the sprinters. I’m tipping it won’t come down to a bunch sprint. The hills are tough enough that it will be a race of attrition and there won’t be sprinters left at the end. It’ll suit guys like Simon Gerrans and Cadel Evans extremely well. My guess is that it’ll come down to a small group of Classics riders who will punch it out in the end.
My tip for PROs: put on your 11t-25t cassette. You’ll be feeling it by the 8th time around!
