blackberry crit
joe "el chihuahua" holmes put on another great race. the guy knows how to do it. get a community behind it, get a good course and throw lots of money at the riders. and then pay them out in straight cash money (forget checks).
this race was associated with the blackberry festival of bremerton. unfortunately, i was unable to partake in any of the blackberry festivities.
the prize list was $5,000 for the pro/1/2 category men, so Symmetrics, the vancouver, BC based pro team brought down their hot shots, including cam evans, current canadian national crit champion. another rider made it up from the san francisco area to race as well. other than that, it was basically the typical local guys, chasing fame, glory and cash money.
we figured that with two strong teams in attendance (us and symmetrics) that a break would go early and stick. really, they're in a different category than us, so the key was to be in any breaks that contained more than one of their guys because we wouldn't be likely to chase them down.
not even a few minutes into the race i bridged across to riders who were pulling away, a symmetrics rider and the lombardi guy from san francisco. i missed a few pulls but found this to be more difficult than just soft pulling through, so i proceeded to take soft pulls. cam evans bridged to us and the group worked well (with me still taking weak pulls). i thought that would be the race, but such was not the case.
from there the race went in spurts with a few breaks getting small gaps but no real traction. symmetrics got a good leadout organized and the hagens / berman sprinters latched onto that. curry attempted to "bomb" their train but to no avail. in the sprint curry jumped but chad didn't and so i had to come around chad in the wind and didn't quite get the "slingshot" that was so key to this sprint. curry pulled out 3rd, i was 4th and chad was 6th. tony and schmitt were 17th and 18th or something like that.
it was a good race, but not quite what we expected.
