In stark contrast to yesterday’s start today was pretty cold but the racing was still red hot. There are some seriously quick cross country riders here honing their form and collecting some UCI points for their Olympic qualification. Jirka Novák and Sebastian, plus Yana Belomoina and Margot Moschetti, both CST Superior Brentjens teams started the day in the blue leader’s jerseys. Today’s circuit from Finestrat was 43km’s with 1431m of ascent.
Posted by Costa Blanca Bike Race on Friday, 29 January 2016
The start was rapid but the steep ascent to the 7km mark quickly slowed the speed. With pitches of 25% riders were chewing on the stem. After this though we enjoyed almost 20km of descending, all the way down to the amazing coastline at Benidorm with some great singletrack sections. Nothing as technical as yesterday but still enough to keep you on your toes.
The last 15km took us from sea level up to 400 meters. Tom and I were surprised to see the finish town quite so quickly; it took us just 2 hours to complete what we’d expected to be a 2 hours 30 stage. Over the line we were 21st but the time gaps are close, 3 or 4 minutes quicker would have put us in the top 10. If we’d known the stage was going to be short we could have pushed on harder on the final climb and made up much of that time gap. Hopefully our fresh legs will help us move up the order in tomorrow’s queen stage.
Up front Jan Karnitzl and Maous Ulman took the stage and pull on the leaders jersey, Tiago Ferreira and David Rosa were second, Rudi Van Houts and Hans Becking were third. Just 2 minutes split the top 5 on general classification. In the women’s the podium was a repeat of yesterday with Yana Belomoina and Margot Moschetti taking the top step and retaining their leaders jersey. Second place was Nathalie Schneitter and Viviane Favery, and third place Kristien Achten and Alice Pirard.
Forgotten are the route signage issues from day 1, today served up another great day of racing. Costa Blanca Bike Race is turning out to be a fantastic opener for the season. Tomorrow’s stage 3 is where things get really interesting. It’s the queen stage with 78km’s and 2776 meters of ascent.