It’s getting warmer, both in terms of weather and the season championship competitions. The final places in the age categories were mainly settled at our last road race of the year, at Midweek.
The A-race was a 5-lapper with the B-race a punchy 3 laps long. Both races started together and this year’s ‘to-be-crowned’ Women’s Champion, was still hanging with the men at the end of the first lap. If you are not familiar with RW races, we always try to get in a half lap of sighting/warm-up in a neutralised fashion, before we start racing proper.
B-Race Results
Becky Concannon used her race craft to keep on the wheels of Paul Etchell and Alfie Piñano as they did their first three laps, to take the first place on the podium.
Behind her, Razan Mofti combined well with Herbert Paul Mariñas (nice to see you back racing with us!) for the first couple of laps but managed to pull away to finish by herself on lap 3. In third place was Claire (Gina) Charleton, still getting used to the more dynamic experience of riding in a group, compared to time trialling in triathlons.
Well done all the ladies.
A-Race Results
It’s always a challenge to write these news reports as I generally am in the race, not standing by the side and watching it evolve. I did however have a GoPro camera attached to the back of my bike and this week, it didn’t all off like it did in Race 12 at Bonita! Always learning… 😉
Anyway, this season has been dominated by riders from Al Sharq as they work well together to see off individual riders. This race was different in that American triathlete Travis Hunnicutt joined in the mix and made an ad-hoc partnership with me (Richard Cross) as we tried to deal with the Sharq problem!
Abdullah Al Shammari, Abdulkarim Tamimi and Bader Almouhana played ‘domestiques’ to Jameel Alghamdi and Ahmed Alomarani. Riders were sent up the road to attack and thin out the field. By lap 3, with constant driving over the “Camel Humps” hills, only the 5 Sharq riders, plus Richard, Travis and Ahmed Gomizi were left together. Jameel, Bader and Abdullah were about 30 seconds up the road, not pushing too hard, waiting for Ahmed to shake the other riders off. On one of the humps, he’d dropped back about 40m and looked to be using Abdulkarim to drag him back towards the next group of riders.
Was he bluffing?
On the first camel hump on lap 4, Abdulkarim briefly had to stop with a mechanical issue (the Go-Pro footage showed heavy cross-chain gearing was the probable reason for this and he quickly remounted his bike but would never catch back). And for the first time this season, Ahmed Alomrani was isolated with no team mates to support him. Which naturally, we pointed out to him.
Richard attempted to attack again on the east-facing hill going up to the Olaya Resort and Travis briefly fell back, Ahmed on his wheel. But with about 50m of hill to go before the left turn, Ahmed recovered and powered his way past, made the turn and kept the power as he headed downhill. With one and a half laps to go, Richard and Travis failed to work together to try and chase Ahmed down as he showed his class and caught up with his team mates.
Split in the team
4 Al Sharq riders came in together, Travis 44s back and Richard another 30s after that (the two of them making the fastest final lap times in an attempt to close the gap on the race winners). And for the first time this year, the Sharqs didn’t all finish together. Maybe we will see more effective alliances on the road next year in a bid to challenge them again…?
Other fights
Another chase group had formed behind the leaders, containing the riders who placed 8th-13th. As is often the way, the riders who did a lot of work pulling the group around suffered in the final sprint up to the Midweek start line. Of course, there’s always a desire to attack hard on one of the hills, or to sprint out of a corner, but these are highly energy draining if they don’t succeed. Just 4s separated Ahmed Gomizi, Ashraf Arafah, Badr Albadr, Marcel Kofler and Abdulkarim Almusalam whilst an exhausted looking Anas AlBabtain came up the hill 21s later with plenty of things to think about regarding his race tactics.
Benjamin Gardner managed to shake Simon Halford on the last lap and beat him by 13s for 14th place. Similarly Paul Etchell looked strong and managed to gap Alfie Piñano by 3s up to the line. A big man with a big (uphill!) sprint.
Just One Race to Go
Well done to all finishers on a really great day for bike racing. There’s just one more race to go for the season. The file below contains all the scores from the races, including those from Race 13.
