Kanstantin Sivtsov (High Road) attacked Levi Leipheimer (Astana) and race leader Trent Lowe (Slipstream-Chipotle) in the final 500 meters to win the sixth stage of the Tour de Georgia and move into the overall lead on Saturday. Sivtsov, the under-23 world champion in 2005, started the day six seconds down on Lowe in eighth place, but well off most people’s radars.
With the opening day jitters gone from their legs, the worlds’ top cross-country mountain bikers head to Offenburg, Germany for the second round of the 2008 UCI World Cup. The event falls one week after riders took their first taste of World Cup racing at the opening round in Houffalize, Belgium, just a three-hour drive away. The women take to the course at 10:30 a.m. and the men’s race begins at 2:30 p.m. Central European Time. For those looking to watch the action, the Web site www.universalbikeracing.com is broadcasting live coverage of all the World Cups.
At the Tour de Georgia, mechanics spent the night before Saturday’s decisive Brasstown Bald stage switching cassettes on wheels. In place of 10-speed units with a 21, 23 or 25 as the lowest gear, riders’ rear wheels for today have 26, 27 and even 28 teeth. Unfortunately for most riders, adding that metaphoric “extra gear” isn’t quite so easy — either you have it or you don’t to make it up Brasstown near the front. [nid:75387]
A new climb with about 20 kilometers to go in Sunday’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège should pump fresh excitement into one of the oldest races in cycling. The steep climb at La Roche aux Faucons ("Falcon's Rock") is giving hope to riders such as Damiano Cunego, Frank Schleck and Cadel Evans that the hardest of the Ardennes classics will be even more explosive. “I think this climb will make the final more selective and even harder,” said Cunego, winner at Amstel Gold Race. “This is a true climb that I think will change everything. I see a small group pulling away and staying away.”
If Friday’s prologue time trial is any indicator of what the weekend has in store, La Vuelta de Bisbee will come down to Team Tecos vs. the rest of the field. Tecos riders posted seven of the top 10 times in the 2.8-mile hill climb, which began on Main Street in Old Bisbee and ascended through Tombstone Canyon to the top of the Mule Pass Tunnel. The Guadalajara-based team brought nine riders to the 30th installment of the three-day race.
Race starts at 10:00 a.m. ET
Stage 5 is the longest stage of the 2008 Tour de Georgia. It will include three major climbs: Burnt Mountain, Woody Gap and Crown Mountain. The 133.4-mile route starts in Suwanee and passes through 10 counties before finishing in Dahlonega.
Frank Overton, who is Health Net-Maxxis rider Frank Pipp's coach, says he has a simple recipe if you want to duplicate the 4,520 kJ's that Pipp put out in Friday's 133-mile stage 5 of the Tour de Georgia.
Acqua e Sapone's Stefano Garzelli won his second stage of the Trentino stage race in Italy on Friday, a mountainous 178.6km stage from Lavarone to Pejo Fonti. Liquigas' Vincenzo Nibali took the overall win in the four-day stage race; Garzelli finished second overall. Nibali took the overall lead after winning Thursday's stage from Torri del Benaco to Folgaria.
Where exactly does La Vuelta de Bisbee fit into cycling history? Well, in 1976, when the southern Arizona stage race was first run, Eddy Merckx had just won Milan-San Remo for a record seventh time, Greg LeMond finished second behind Clark Natwick in the junior race at the Tour of Nevada City, and mountain-bike racing debuted with the inaugural Repack Downhill in Marin County, California, won by Bob Burrowes. And the first edition of Velo-news was still two years away.
How much did Health Net-Maxxis rider Frank Pipp pitch in in Thursday's stage 4 team time trial? How about 396 normalized watts and 362 average watts for 20:17? That's the report from Pipp's coach, Frank Overton. "Not bad for the fourth stage, when you’ve been off the front for 40 percent of the entire race," Overton said.
After days of racing, hours of hard labor, crashes, strategizing and dozens of employed strategies, attacks and counterattacks, the overall competition at the Tour de Georgia comes down to a simple question: who has the best power-to-weight ratio? The few favorites still in contention for the overall title will answer this physical test on the slopes of Brasstown Bald Mountain, where stage 6 concludes Saturday.
After sitting behind a ProTour engine over 133 hilly miles, Bissell’s Richard England timed his sprint right to take stage 5 of the 2008 Tour de Georgia on Friday. Slipstream-Chipotle’s Trent Lowe finished in the select front group of 22 riders to take the yellow jersey from High Road’s Greg Henderson, who had a hard day and came off the group on the second KOM climb.
Jittery Joe's team boss Micah Rice has been filming throughout the Tour de Georgia and posting the footage online daily. "I've got every single sprint finish, but I've also got things like the pre-race team meeting where in six minutes of footage you can watch the entire team talking about the plan for the day," Rice said. "We have an interview with Cody (Stevenson) after his crash, road rash and all. And we have interviews with various people as the day moves on. We have a ton of stuff up there."
Slipstream rider expected to make a full recovery with no neurological damage
Chances that Alejandro Valverde will repeat his 2006 victory at Liège-Bastogne-Liège all depend on what the rain gods decide to do on Sunday. If the peloton is drenched with rain and cold, he might finish even worse than 21st as he did in Flèche Wallonne. But if benevolent skies return, like he saw with a best-ever third at Amstel Gold Race last weekend under a warm Dutch sun, he’ll be in with a shot.
Kona Bicycle has a new line of gloves with models for mountain biker, freeriders, roadies and kids. The men’s Chevron glove ($25) is intended for cross-country. It features a Chamude palm for increased durability, silicone grip finger tips for better braking control and a terry snot wipe thumb. The women’s XC glove offers an air-mesh palm with Chamude overlays for added durability and circulation, 4mm gel palm pad and gripped finger tips.
Jason Sumner and Neal Henderson touch on finding time for it all and staying competitive
Dear Readers,
Wyatt Earp tried his hand at many things in his long and colorful life; at various times he worked as a farmer, teamster, buffalo hunter, saloon-keeper, gambler, and miner, among his many other occupations, but it was as a lawman in the Old Wild West that Earp found the immortality of lasting fame—and most of all, for his work as a sometime-lawman in Tombstone, Arizona. For a scant three months, beginning around July of 1880, Wyatt Earp was the Deputy Sheriff for southern Pima County.