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6th Jacob's Creek Tour Down Under - 2.3
Australia, January 20-25, 2004
Rider Diaries
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The Last Hurrah: The Patrick Jonker diary
Nationality: Australian/Dutch
Team: UniSA
After 10 successful years as a pro rider, Patrick Jonker has decided to make the transition back to normality. The Jacob's Creek Tour Down Under will be the final race of his career, and the lanky Aussie has all intentions of going out on a high, with the aim of winning the race held in his own backyard.
Diary entries
Stage 4: Friday Jan 24, Unley - Hahndorf, 141 km
Horses for courses; tomorrow critical
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The first half hour we cruised along, which was good. We went over the first climb - it was a pretty big climb - then once we were on top, the attacks started. Then for an hour and a bit it was flat out, attacks going all the time.
Obviously our boys had a tough job staying in touch, but I reckon they did a great job. You know, they were pretty motivated having the yellow in the team. They put in extra effort and we were able to control the break that was ahead. As we kept it within a minute and a half, Graeme Brown's Panaria team helped with a couple of riders in a possible bunch sprint at the end.
As it turned out, we were between two and three minutes all day and the highest of the GC was five minutes down I think, so we were always in control. Basically it was a perfect scenario for me and if I could repeat this scenario tomorrow, it looks pretty good. If I can keep the position one more stage, then it's probably in the bag.
We have one more hard day ahead, basically. One big one. All the boys are going to have to dig in extra deep tomorrow. I will probably have a rough time tomorrow. It's the sort of stage where people can get up the road. If you let that happen, they can get 10 minutes easily.
Tomorrow will be a critical day. If we're in the same position 24 hours from now, we will be pretty happy.
The horse on the course, well we had that in Europe a couple of times in France. The horse broke away and luckily it didn't head into the peloton. A horse can be pretty dangerous. It's bigger than us. Hopefully the horse is alright - the riders were alright, although everyone was on edge for a few seconds, just in case.
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Everyone was surprised to see him. From a distance you thought he was behind a fence, but when we got closer we saw he was only a few metres away. It could have been worse. A horse running into a peloton at 60 kilometres an hour can be pretty dangerous. I ride horses, but that one looked pretty wild. A bit wild for me.
The end of the story was just that; the teams got together for a bunch sprint, with people like Robbie and Baden looking for a stage win. Robbie took out the bunch sprint which puts him in second overall now, I think. My main danger will still be Gilbert from FdJeux.com and those boys - Figueras, Botcherov - they are still the main problems, really. The team will ride balls out to the bottom of the climb.
The climb doesn't worry me, actually. I live there, in the vineyards of the south Adelaide region and I know the climb like I know the back of my hand. It's my backyard. There's no surprises on the climb, it's basically who is the strongest. If one of the GC guys is having a good day, they could blow my hopes away.
