The John Lieswyn Diary 2000

14th Annual Killington Stage Race

Killington/Rutland Vermont, September 2-4, 2000

Over the years this stage race has grown to over 800 competitors in all categories. It has had 5 stages in the past including a time trial. With ambiguous support from the ski area the new race organizer Deb Makowsky had to shorten the race to 3 stages. That hasn't dampened the enthusiasm of the volunteers, riders or spectators and it is very well organized.

Stage 1 - September 2: Brandon Gap Road Race

Shaklee brought five riders to the race this year: myself, Glen Mitchell, Dave McCook, Eric Wohlberg, and introducing young Dartmouth College history major Robbie Dapice. Mercury's top team is still in Europe so they have a light squad here. Saturn, Navigators, 7UP, and Jelly Belly all have strong teams here. We figured we needed to be in any breakaways containing Saturn and Navigators, and hopefully not outnumbered. The course starts in Rutland, features a 1500 ft. climb over Brandon Gap, and a finishing climb up to the Killington Base Lodge. Throughout the day, all of us took our turns covering attacks. Even Robbie was doing a great job. We weren't using race radios this weekend and I got some bad information regarding the composition of an early break. We had Eric up there with two Saturns and I was told there were two Navigators. I felt pretty good and with Eric's non-cooperation effectively neutralizing the break it didn't take long to bring the race all back together.

On Brandon Gap Eric was once again away with both McCormacks (Saturn) and Tour de France veteran Andy Bishop. Just 30 seconds behind and without any concerted chase effort, we could see all the action ahead as one by one the break diminished in size. Eric steamed away by himself to try and put the pressure on the other teams, and scoring the KOM (king of the mountain) points. By the bottom of the descent he had widened his lead to 0:55. Dave and I headed back to the team car to dispose of raingear and pick up bottles. The race caravan vehicles were in a total state of disarray. Dave didn't help matters much when he threw off a full bottle into our team car, which then lodged itself underneath the brake pedal. Brenda (driving, massaging, managing, doing it all this weekend) nearly rammed the race official's car ahead of her whilst trying to extricate the bottle!

Dave and I got out of the mess and rejoined the peloton to find that about seven riders had escaped. Thankfully we had Glen in this chasing group to represent Shaklee. 7UP wasn't happy with this development and eventually sent their team to the front to chase it down. As we headed into the final climb, we were all together. I was impressed to see our sprinter McCook still going with attacks and riding the front at the base of the Killington climb! I was cramping from not drinking enough Performance and too much Coke, but I figured I'd throw in a soft attack to try and set up Glen going into the final kilometer.

It turned out that the finish was quite a bit further up the mountain than in previous years, and I was attacking at 2km to go when I thought we had less than 800m to go. I didn't get a gap, and Saturn's Chris Wherry followed with a seriously hard acceleration. Initially I stuck to his wheel, but then leg cramps curtailed my efforts. Wherry went clear alone, and then Glen made a huge big-chainring bridging effort to be the only man to stay in the race for first. The two of them dueled it out to the finish, with Wherry taking the win by just 2 seconds. This is good for us, as Saturn will now have to defend the lead in the criterium and probably on Monday as well. Shaklee has 2nd GC, the the lead in the teams, sprints and KOM categories.

Notes: today's Rutland Herald had great race coverage and full color pictures. Unfortunately, the caption below the front page picture read "Top professional riders roll out of Orwell during Saturday's 99.3 mile segment of the Killington Stage Race. The riders ignored the "Stop Ahead" sign on the road." Just great. Every local reader uninitiated in the sport is going to be appalled and all the more likely to run us off the road now.

Results

Stage 2 - September 3: Rutland Criterium

The coffee house on the first turn was packed, and the crowd was thick on the start finish straight and the hill. We blasted over the hill on the first lap and pierced the pungent BBQ smoke from a huge outdoor grill. We didn't know if Saturn would ride tempo and defend or try attacking. Glen spent the entire race following Wherry to ensure we didn't miss an attack by the race leader. Navigators "laid the smack down" early on and put Baldwin and Davidenko 20 seconds off the front. The latter would accumulate enough sprint points to take that jersey by the end of the stage. It took the race leader's team a good 15 minutes to shut down that.

By the midpoint of the race Wherry's team was starting to look a bit ragged, and everyone was chucking in attacks. At five laps to go Chris Baldwin (Nav) escaped. Saturn wasn't going to chase this one as Baldwin had lost over 12 minutes to Wherry on stage one. 7UP did a fierce chase for their sprinter, Chris Fisher. At two laps to go Glen attacked solo on the hill to try and get some time on Wherry, who wasn't in position to respond immediately. The effort was strong but came up short as Wherry still had one teammate left to chase Glen. Baldwin held off the field to win by inches over his teammate Davidenko, our McCook took third and Fisher was fourth.

On the podium again, and Shaklee came out of today fresh (relative to Saturn). I was in the top ten and got to witness an awesome evasive maneuver by Fisher: just meters after the line Baldwin had sat up to post his arms in victory, and Fisher skidded sideways at 40mph to avoid running him over. The finish was that close!

Big 200km day tommorrow, early wakeup to cook and drive to the 9am start.

Results

Stage 3 - September 4: SAAB Road Race 200km/125mi

Very hilly. Rutland-Killington, rainy, cool weather.

Maybe I should have just stayed in bed this morning...

Everyone figured today would be a brutal race of attrition. I lined up near the back of the pack with Glen and Eric. We hadn't gone 500 meters before I looked up the road to see a six man breakaway forming. What? Already? Shaklee had Dave McCook and Robbie Dapice to represent us up there, the only team with two riders in the move. Unfortunately, despite their top notch riding this weekend, neither one was expected to make it 200 km over all these climbs. Their breakaway mates were John Peters (Mercury), Jon Hamblen (Navigators), Andy Bishop (Gary Fisher/Saab), Harm Jansen (Saturn), and one other guy. The unnamed rider would go on to take hard pulls for the first 100km and then get dropped (this isn't an intelligent strategy). Bishop was the highest placed rider on GC in the move, with Jansen close behind. Our guys helped initially but when it became apparent what they were up against they declined to help any further.

Back in the peloton, Saturn was happy as could be with a highly placed and strong rider in the move. They proceeded to line up at the front to protect yellow jersey Wherry, and go as slow as possible to save energy for the inevitable attacks. While this situation wasn't optimal for wearing out Saturn and isolating Wherry, us Shaklee boys were a little undermanned to take things into our own hands.

We hadn't gone 20km before the rider in front of me decided he'd like to ram they guy in front of him for kicks. One minute we're cruising along at 30kph, the next minute he's sprawling all over the ground in front of me. I skidded sideways, unclipping my foot at the same time, and JUST missed his bike. His flailing limbs weren't so lucky as I couldn't avoid running over his fingers. Phew! Incident one: disaster narrowly averted.

Soon the leaders were up to a lead of six minutes. Wheelworks/Cannondale sent two guys to the front to increase our speed for a while. We crawling along at about 35kph about 4km from the base of the second climb when one of the Saturn guys stopped to take a leak, and I figured it would be a good time to do the same. The race caravan and neutral mechanical support passed. On clipping back in and standing up to accelerate, my rear wheel slipped out of the frame (a problem I've had with this frame, which I'm using until my custom Marin is repaired from damages sustained at Chicago).

The carbon wheel pretzled. Dismounting, I whipped the wheel out and yelled at the straggling caravann vehicles asking for a wheel. Two minutes passed, no one else was in sight on the roadway. I looked at the wheel, wondering if I could straighten it. I gave it a spin in my hands; lo and behold the Cane Creek had de-pretzled itself when I removed it from the frame. After reinstallation and recentering the rear brake, I set off in pursuit of the peloton, now at least 4 minutes ahead of me. Race signs directed me to turn off the main road onto the narrow climb.

As I set up for the turn, I could hear a rider who had been dropped long ago and must have been pretty psyched to see a pro to chase with coming up behind me. He evidently didn't see the signs. Captain Ramrod drove his front wheel into my rear derailleur and went down hard. Great, now I'm 4min down, chasing with gears that are jammed into no larger than 53x17. I'm really flying up the climb now, adrenaline from another near crash surging through me. Through the light rain and fog I see the lights of caravan cars ahead of me. I'm thinking, maybe the field is still crawling along! No, it's group after group of dropped riders. I wonder what they thought when I hammered by them at twice their speed.

It took lots of high rpm spinning and the assistance of a few more recently dropped riders to regain the peloton on the descent. Then, my fears of being out of the race aleviated and with an eye on the speed of the group, I stopped to try and rectify the damage to my gears. I managed to get back all but the highest gear with some fenagaling, and rejoined the peloton in short order. Incident Two: wasted energy, but no permanent damage!

On the third climb Eddie Gragus (Jelly Belly) was lighting it up at the front and whittling the group down to about a dozen. We were single file behind him. He decided he'd had enough and abruptly quit pedaling on a steep climb. Stack, stack, stack. Wherry was on the brakes, Glen swerved to avoid Wherry, and I ran into Glen from behind. Wham, I'm on the ground. It was just 600m to the top of the climb so I needed to pick myself up quickly. This time both wheels where jammed against the frame and forks, and both brakes twisted. Hasty realignment, a hard chase, and I rejoined before the summit. Incident Three: embarrassment and more scrapes to go along with the ones that just healed from Chicago.

The break was coming to pieces. Jansen, Bishop and Hamblen were still 4min up while our men and Peters were coming back to us quickly. The peloton had regrouped after the last descent. We had a choice: sacrifice Eric's & my energy to bring back Jansen (to set up Glen for a shot at the stage win, but costing us the teams classification win) or bluff and hope someone else had enough horsepower to do it for us. 7UP seemed eager to oblige so after Eric and I worked for about 5 minutes we dropped back to see if they could do it on their own.

We were 1:20 down as we headed into the final climb to the finish. I stopped again to realign dragging brakes (the front wheel had disconcertingly MOVED in the fork) and had to chase back on to the splintering pack on the steep initial pitch, 5km from the finish. Now I was really fried, but Shaklee needed 3 guys to finish well for the teams race. Navigators had Hamblen up the road, Davidenko solo 45sec ahead of us, and 3 more guys in the remnants of the pack. So I had to dig deep and hang on for all I was worth.

Bishop came back to us, after having "driven" the breakaway for nearly 200km and securing at least the KOM jersey for his efforts. Glen attacked ferociously 2km to go but Wherry had been planning the same thing and was right on him, with only 7UP's Doug Ziewacz able to follow them. I was pedaling squares to hold on to roughly 12th place just behind Eric, but I could see that Doug got dropped at 1km to go while Wherry and Glen attacked each other. They passed Davidenko, and came within sight of Jansen and Hamblen.

Glen outsprinted Wherry for 3rd on the stage and the attendant 4sec time bonus, but with a deficit of 6sec going into the stage it wasn't enough to win the overall. Still, a great ride for Glen this weekend. Jansen took the stage from Hamblen. I was happy Jon got this result because his confidence was severely diminished after suffering all season with anemia.

Next stop: Boston...

Final Results