Ghent Wevelgem started the night before when all the kiwi team met in the hotel just outside of the race village. We went and had a mean kiwi feed, banter levels were high. All the lads knew we had to pull a result and send it for some critical Nations Cup points.
The next morning we set out pinging with road captain Big T aka Matias steadying the ship as we rolled to the start. We parked up in the NZ setup and waited around in a balmy 5 degrees as we got some final race tactics from Dirk before lining up early to ensure a good start position. As the gun went the bunch was nervous and people were crashing everywhere. Matias kept all the boys calm at the back before signalling to get mongrel when it started to heat up. This was followed almost instantly by the first big crash where Liam came down hard. The rest of the lads managed to avoid it. The bunch was still twitchy so another crash happened shortly after where James and I came down this coincided with Ethan getting held up behind me as I was ragging into some hedges. When I got up I whacked the chain back on I could she James had also come down and wasn’t panicking to much as there was two of us and we should be able to get back. We started out and were catching group after group and were making good progress back to the pointy end of the race. I could feel my wheel had a mega buckle in it from the crash, this ended up being the tyre which had come off the bead I rudely found out as soon as we hit the first cobble section. I heard a loud explosion which was my rear tyre. At this point I knew it was going to be a long day out as the car was not in sight. We got the wheel changed and it was a solo death mission to try catch the peloton. It was quite a lonely 50 odd km until I finally got back, I saw the odd group on the road but they were spent majority of the riders and couldn’t offer anything to the chase back. When I eventually made it back I was stoked to see the kiwi brother Liam in there and we worked well to stay in good position for the crosswind sections and corners. We got around the cobbled climbs and were on the way home hoping the other boys were taking names and punching tickets up the road.
About 10k out from the finish they pulled the whole peloton which was appropriately 30 guys, this was really strange as we weren’t that far back maybe only 4 or 5 minutes. And it was such a Large number of riders. In the end I thing only about 30ish guys made it around with the big dogs James and Ethan doing the lads proud. James managed to pull a 6th and get the boys some valuable points. Big thanks to Dirk And everyone else who made it possible and helped out the Kiwis it wouldn’t have been possible with out you.
