Lucas Euser's Tour of California diary

As he enters his third year of competition as a professional, 23-year-old Team Slipstream Sports powered by Chipotle rider Lucas Euser will keep Cyclingnews updated with his and the outfits progress each day at the Tour of California. It's the youngster's second Tour of California, after he contested the Tour last year where he finished 49th.

Index to all entries

February 20, 2007

The real race begins

After the Prologue anticipation/excitement jitters wore off, reality set in as I realised the big race is about to begin. After getting a boost of confidence from the prologue, our entire team was motivated to make things interesting today. Our notorious leader put it best, by saying we are at the forefront of a David versus Goliath situation.

Now our plan wasn't to beat Goliath in one day, but we were definitely going to let him know we mean business, and that we did. Don't get me wrong, I am friends with a lot of guys out there, but when we are on the bikes it's time to race and fight till we can't fight no more.

The plan was simple today: keep things together until the first sprint, then have Jason Donald give it a go for the first three second time bonus to put him in the yellow jersey. There are many different variations of doing that, which made us have to make some decisions on the fly.

The first decision starts with the fact that Tom Peterson climbs with the best of them and without even trying had gotten second in the King of the Mountains competition in the prologue. That made it a logical choice to have him go for the rest of the points today.

That decision was made on the road when we all came to the top of Mount Tam in one group and he again snagged second place points. That was a little risky because it formed a break off the front that Discovery wasn't happy to let roll, however we had other objectives, we weren't about to settle for just one jersey - we wanted the big one.

So, the first rock was thrown at Goliath and like we said we would do, we chased. Tom and teammate Will Frishkorn sat on as we chased. We were not making any friends, but we had a plan and we were sticking to it.

Time came for the sprint and Jason missed out, but if we didn't try then we would have been kicking ourselves and speculating on what could have been. We are here to race and we are here to learn how to get better - we can't do that without sticking our necks out every once in a while. For that one reason Team Slipstream/Chipotle will continue to have success and continue to make every race we enter one to remember.

Lucas was caught in the massive pileup with two laps to go.
Photo ©: Jon Devich

Oh yeah, and how about that freaking crash? To the best of my knowledge here is how things went down, literally:

With two laps to go T-Mobile's Gerald Ciolek brushed wheels with teammate Greg Henderson while the German squad had its whole team on the front. I'm sitting about 15th when all of a sudden guys are on the ground in front of me. From there I'm pretty sure my surfing skills took over, as trying to get away from it was like surfing a wave made of lycra, fancy bikes, and sweaty men!

Somehow, after getting bounced around a bit, my bike was ripped out from below me and I was on my feet falling into the metal barrier. A jaw-dropped spectator grabbed me and asked if I was okay and, to my amazement, I replied, with an extremely confused look: "Yeah, I think so."

I managed to get the bike out from beneath the pile and ride on, however the crash caused total pandemonium throughout the entire course. Nobody knew what was going on, guys were just riding as hard as they could.

There were quite a few groups scattered but in the end the results show everyone that was together before the crash got the same time, which made some people happy and others not so happy. In the end it's up the chief official and the official ruling was that after the crash the course was deemed unsafe and therefore neutralized - giving everyone the same time.

Aside from the bumps and bruises, all our guys made it through and the overall general classification is very similar to where we started the day. Tomorrow the battle continues…

Lucas Euser
Team Slipstream powered by Chipotle