My Ladies Tour of Qatar – Stage One

Posted on February 8, 2016     Leave a Comment

The Ladies Tour of Qatar finished a few days ago. I went into the race with high hopes but in the end had to settle for ninth overall, eight places less than what I had hoped for.

A journalist who had told me I was his pick came to me after the tour had wrapped up and said, ‘I’ll never tell you your my pick again.’ If I was a superstitious person I would definitely lay all the blame on him, but the realist in me says that might be a bit unreasonable.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom however, I did manage to claim a stage win in the final stage.

Throughout the Tour I kept daily diaries on Ella. I thought, just incase you weren’t an Ella reader I would repost them here but I encourage you to head on over to Ella and check out the original posts.

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If you know me you know that I love returning to the desert year after year to race the Ladies Tour of Qatar. At the team presentation today the race commentator announced that the 2016 Tour is my seventh edition, I’ve ridden all but the first edition of the race, which began in 2009. It’s somewhat embarrassing, because it makes me feel about a hundred years old. I’m 25 I swear.

Why the love affair? There’s just something about the camels I guess. The looks they give me…

No, in all seriousness I just love the fast, aggressive racing that the flat, windy courses stimulate. Speaking with my roommate Dani King after today’s stage (she’s a Ladies Tour of Qatar virgin) she said, ‘you just have to fight all day’. I replied: ‘you definitely don’t really get the opportunity to relax in these races, that’s for sure.’

This year’s edition is made up of four stages; two new and two old.

Today’s 97km first stage of the Tour was also a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Road World Championships, which will be held in Doha in October this year. The stage consisted of a long 75km or so loop before we entered a finishing circuit. In today’s stage we did one lap of the circuit, but I’m assuming we will do more in October.

What conclusions can be drawn after racing the (sort of) Worlds course? For the safety of the majority of the peloton, I hope the wind is blowing the camels sideways and a smaller group enters the finishing circuit. It is super technical with roundabouts, 180° corners and occasional traffic cones just scattering the side of the road (although I have a feeling these may be removed come October).

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Back to today and the first stage of the Ladies Tour of Qatar.

My Wiggle High5 team had gone in to the race with a fairly open race plan. It’s always hard to know who is firing and what tactics other teams will be employing in — what for most riders — is the first race of the season.

We just wanted to stay at the front of the race and have numbers in any significant splits if they occurred. Some time bonuses at the two intermediate sprints and on the finishing sprint would be nice as well, but as my director said on numerous occasions, ‘we don’t need to show all our cards on day one’.

Side note: time bonuses play a crucial role in this Tour, they often determine who wins and who loses the overall after the four days of racing, as breakaways — excluding the echelon splits —are a rarity.

Before the stage we had highlighted a few danger points where we thought the crosswinds may play havoc; kilometer 18 and kilometer 35.

We were on the money with the second. As the peloton rocketed towards the 35km, mark you could feel the tension and nerves in the peloton building. It was like a toddler holding a pin above a balloon and looking at mum; you know they’re going to pop it, but you’re not entirely sure if it will be in a few seconds or a few minutes.

As we made a sharp left hand turn, the head wind we had been riding into turned into a crosswind and the balloon had been popped. Girls were scrambling to get to the front before too much damage had been done and gaps were too big to close anymore.

Boels-Dolmans were the main aggressors pushing the pace, riding the echelon and ‘guttering’ the rest of the peloton. Canyon-SRAM joined the party and soon the race was split. It wasn’t decimated like you can see happen in crosswinds, but the peloton of 90 had been reduced to 20 or so.

The first intermediate sprint came not long after and Kirsten Wild and I battled it out for the valuable time bonuses; Wild got the better of me clinching the three seconds for first. I had to settle for two seconds. Better than nothing, but not what I had been hunting for.

The bunch ended up reforming not long after. While the winds were strong, they weren’t strong enough to do any serious damage and the peloton entered the finishing circuit all together.

I can’t say I enjoyed the technical finishing circuit. The peloton was nervous, no-one knew where they were going exactly and everyone was fresh.

The second intermediate sprint came just 9km from the finish and my teammate, Emma Johannson, did a great job of positioning me for it. I ended up picking up another two bonus seconds with Chantal Blaak grabbing the three seconds. I was the virtual leader on the road, not that that really meant anything.

As the kilometres began to tick down, I found my team but it was chaotic. Riders and trains were going everywhere. The front of the peloton was being controlled by Boels, then Orica, then Cipollini, then Hitec.

“I’m not going to start second guessing it because I screwed up one sprint”

My team and I rounded the second last corner which came just under 2km from the finish about three riders back, but it was just Elisa Longo Borghini, Amy Pieters and I left. Emma had been caught behind and was making her way back. Fighting other riders and the wind, my legs definitely hadn’t recovered from the sprint seven kilometres before.

In the end, I went backwards in the sprint for the stage honours. All I could do was watch and see Wild, Cucinotta and Lizzie Williams battle for the stage win. They ended up finishing in that order.

I go into tomorrow’s second stage tied with Williams for third on the general classification. It’s not the end of the world. It’s definitely not the start I had envisioned for my Ladies Tour of Qatar, but as I said to my team manager Rochelle, ‘I know my form is good, I’m not going to start second guessing it because I screwed up one sprint’.

And as my director always says, ‘You’ve got to look on the bright side of life.’ Three more days to hunt down 9 seconds.

My Mt. Buninyong

Posted on January 10, 2016     5 Comments

Oh hey, it’s been a minute. And because it has been, let’s be honest, a little bit longer than a minute, I should probably update you.

If my life was a soap opera I imagine the narrator’s summary of the last 6 months would go something like this; in July, after La Course by Le Tour I cut my hand on glass slicing my tendons in my pinky, ring and middle finger, rupturing an artery and partially cutting my ulnar nerve. This, as it turns out, is bad.

My season was over and all I could do was wait eight weeks…

Twelve hours after cutting my hand I underwent micro surgery in Paris.

48 hours after surgery I was back in Canberra and two days after this I was seeing a hand surgeon and specialist hand physio.

My season was over and all I could do was wait eight weeks for my hand to heal enough for me to start training somewhat normally.

How much movement and strength I would get back was totally unknown. It depended largely on how well the surgery went (I couldn’t tell you, my surgeon spoke French) and how diligent I was in my rehab. (I was pretty diligent; for three months I saw my specialist hand physio and a team of physios at the Australian Institute of Sport twice a day, five days a week. I did hand exercises that included staring at my pinky willing it to bend and waving my hand around my head like I was throwing a lasso six times a day, seven days a week and I slept in and wore a purple claw 24 hours a day.)

There were tears, there were regrets, there were many times I swore at myself, but at the end of the day I had to move on and formulate a plan.

Enter my coach, Eric Hakkonssen.

“So, did you crash, Chloe? What happened?” The first conversation I had with Eric post incident was slightly awkward.

“I mean I crashed,” and I did, but I didn’t do any damage. “But I did it afterwards, I slammed my hand down on a glass I didn’t see.”

I’m fairly sure there was a moment of silence where Eric took this all in. And then we decided to make the most out of a bad situation. Together we made the decision to fit two seasons into 18 months rather than one season into 12.

That’s where yesterday’s Australian National Road Cycling Championships come into it all. I said to Eric I’d like to try and target the Nationals, the Ladies Tour of Qatar and try and hold my form through the spring before taking a break and rebuilding towards the Qatar World Championships in October.

I called him today after the race and said “Thank you, I know when I suggested this you probably thought I was crazy , but thank you for getting me ready.”

The lead up

I have made no secret of my dislike of the Australian National Championship course. If youre unsure of what the course is here’s a brief summary; it’s 10.2kilometres circuit with a 3km climb.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic championships course; challenging, gruelling, great for spectators. I’m just sure that this can also be found somewhere else in Australia and find it somewhat unnecessary that it has been on the same course for the past ten years.

With that said, this year I decided to give it a real crack. If the mountain will not come to you, you must go to the mountain (is that a saying or did I make that up?).

I came into the race with the most national’s specific preparation I’ve ever had before. This may be because I have never done any specific preparation. I sat out all but one of the Mitchelton Bay Cycling Classic stages (to be honest I had wanted to race two but I come down with a stomach bug  the day of the second stage). Similarly I choose to sit out the criterium championship on Wednesday.

The Race

As we rolled away from the start my race plan was as straight forward as they come; hide and survive.

Sitting on the start line Tiffany Cromwell said to me that I must be serious, I was wearing a skin suit. I was serious, but the skin suit wasn’t a choice — my swannie must have gotten my leg size confused with Elisa Longo Borghini’s because my knicks gave me leg muffin top.

As we rolled away from the start my race plan was as straight forward as they come; hide and survive. For the first seven laps all I did was try to hide in the peloton following wheels I knew would be strong on the climb.

It was obviously a game plan a number of people had because the break of two — Louisa Lobigs (Holden Women’s Cycling) and Sarah Roy (Orica AIS) — extended their lead to almost three minutes.

I’ve raced on the Buninyong circuit every year since 2009. In 2009 I think I did five laps, in 2010 maybe 6. 2011 I was back to 5 laps. 2012 I finished (although I was horrendously dropped). 2013 and 2014 were my worst years although I can’t remember how many laps I did and last year I finished just out of the top 20 (having said that I don’t think many more than 20 finished). It’s an enviable resume I know.

So when we hit lap seven and I was still spinning away on my 29 up the infamous Mt. Bunninyong    with the lead group I really started to believe that this year, after seven attempts, I might finally be in for a chance.

As we crested the climb for the fourth last time the peloton was starting to splinter. You tell girls were starting to get tired as they started to drift in odd directions in the peloton and their actions weren’t exactly what you would call predictable.

A moment of confusion saw a clip of wheels, an unclipped pedal and a very near crash on the left hand side of the road. At that exact moment Amanda Spratt and Corset rode away.

Obviously sensing the mood in the group Orica decided to start to go to work. They had about a 2:1 ratio of riders to every other team and then a 7:1 ratio to most of the other pro riders, that being there was seven of them and pretty much one of everyone else.

Amanda Spratt launched herself on the right hand side of the road as we took the sweeping left hand corner that signals the beginning of the descent but she didn’t get far. Next Katrin Garfoot catapulted herself off the front with a Holden rider glued to her wheel.

Like when you’re madly refreshing twitter to try and get a race update the whole peloton was on high alert, everybody knew it was not a good idea to let the newly crowned time trial champion up the road.

But who would bite the bullet first?

The scattering of individual riders were poised on their pedals waiting, waiting. I imagine it felt a lot like a Mexican standoff. I guess we could ask El Chapo now what that actually feels like and do a comparison.

Lauren Kitchen pulled the trigger first. She jumped out of the group catching us off guard and all of a sudden there were three super strong riders off the front.

ALERT! ALERT!

Tiff was on the same page as I was sensing the danger and jumped out of the group. I followed her along with Ruth Corset and two other Orica riders and we bridged up to the three ahead.

A moment of confusion saw a clip of wheels, an unclipped pedal and a very near crash on the left hand side of the road. At that exact moment Amanda Spratt and Corset rode away. I watched them go.

If only you could have heard the dialogue in my head; its too early. Just sit on them and don’t do anything. Someone else will go and then follow them. You’ll never last that long out the front. 

The internal struggle was real.

One sprinter who didn’t fall victim to the dialouge in their head was Kimberley Wells. Glancing at Kitchen, then up the road, then at Kitchen again Wells realised if she didnt go no-one else would and went off after Spratt and Corset. Her explosive kick helped her close the gap quickly and the three worked together for the next lap.

As we crossed the finish line with two laps to go Spratt, Corset and Wells had caught Lobigs and Roy. I knew there were going to be fireworks. But they didn’t come until the final lap when Spratt and Corset had gone alone.

Shara Gillow showed what racing for a year with Rabobank does to someone and attacked from the bottom of the climb. She didn’t look back. Then when everyone was hurting she attacked again. In a moment of delirium I though Anna Van der Breggen had entered the Australian national championships. Everybody was eating handle bar stem.

As we motored towards the left hand corner that marks half way up the climb we swallowed up Roy and Lobigs who had been out the front since the second or third lap. My legs started to scream at me. I started to drift backwards. Then I saw my parents and heard my Dad yell, ‘stick with them, Chloe!’

In the seat. Out of the seat. In the seat. My 29 no longer seemed to spin easily. About 500 metres from the top of the climb I exploded. I think I heard someone say, ‘that’s quite a grimace’. Still I could see the depleted peloton. I knew if I got over the top with a small group we could get back.

Cresting the climb the last time I found myself with a small group of six. Whether it’s because I’m bossy, they were scared of me or they didn’t think their race was over either they agreed to work with me and soon we were channeling our inner Jensie, telling our legs to shut up, and chasing down the group in front of us.

As we hit the final corner with 2km to go we latched onto the back of what was left of the race. Who was here? Who was up the road? What place are we sprinting for? All questions I didn’t get answered until after I crossed the line.

While I was getting dropped Garfoot, Kitchen and Rachel Neylan had attacked off the front of the main group in pursuit of Spratt and Corset. They got to within two seconds. I crossed the line 35 seconds behind Australia’s new national champion Amanda Spratt in sixth place taking out the ‘bunch’ sprint.

How do I feel about that? It’s hard to say. Of course I’m struggling with ‘could’ve, would’ve, should’ve’ syndrome. I mean I watched the winning break ride away! But on the other hand I pushed myself harder than I ever have before on that course and finished sixth. It’s not so bad for a chubby sprinter like myself.

Got over a few hills & some other mental barriers (hatred of course) to finish 6th at #RoadNats. No #TimTams before the start this year…

— Chloe Hosking (@chloe_hosking) January 10, 2016