By Cam Bayly ??@cameronbayly Tonight we decided to eat out as a team, we are all getting a little bored of the same ?rice or the Malaysian take on spaghetti for breakfast and dinner, so we decided to try some local Malaysian cuisine. ?We were told the food here in Melaka was really good and sure enough the food was amazing! ?It was nice just to get out of the hotel and do something a little different too. I had a look at today’s stage last night and thought this could be a good opportunity for the early break to stay away, fast twisty undulating roads. ?If the break got a good gap it would be hard to bring it back, even with the big sprinters teams on the front. ?The last 20km was going to be pretty solid and had a couple of reasonable leg pincher climbs. I wanted to be in the early move pretty bad today, but I decided to take a different approach this time. ?I was going to stay up the front and watch until I saw the move go and then I would either follow a late move across or bridge across myself if I had to, after all I should be a little fresher if I timed it well. ?So all was going to plan, watching but not following. Then I saw the move I thought would be the move of the day, which still had one of our riders Thomas Rabou in it, but 2 was better than 1 and I still wanted to be in it. I first followed a wheel that tried to go across, that didn’t work, so I hit it again to go across solo. I was on my way until I look behind and see a couple of Tabriz Petrochemical (TPT) riders sprinting across to me and sure enough they sit up as soon as they get me. ?There were a few other attempts to bridge after that, but that was it and ‘nature break’ was called. All over, yet again no break for me, time to sit in for another motor pacing session behind the yellow jersey’s team. Despite just sitting in the strung out peloton, the race route was quite nice and ended up being a nice day in the saddle. ?TPT were chasing pretty hard, as they let a man only a couple minutes down on GC get up the road, but the gap was not coming down very quickly. With around 30km to go the race started to get quite undulating, it started with a small KOM that we went up quite hard and then it just went up and down from there. Towards the start of this section Astana, TPT and Europcar were able to keep the pace on, but 1 by 1 they were dropping and other teams were starting to attack. I sat in following a couple moves initially, but after a while my legs started to finally feel a bit better, so on the last climb 10km to go I decided to attack, initially just to throw off the control Tinkoff Saxo had on the bunch, as we still had Thomas a bit over a minute up the road. I had a Katusha rider come with me and we got a gap pretty quickly, so we went for it down the decent. I managed to hit 99.9kmh down the decent, disappointing I couldn’t quite crack the 100 but either way it was a pretty fast decent. ?We stayed away for a couple of kms before I look around and strangely enough it’s Belkin’s sprinter Theo Bos who initially came across to us. ?This was pretty short lived and in no time it was back to a bunch, a very splintered bunch which ended up slowing down quite a bit and eventually all coming back together. Meanwhile Thomas was still up the road with a gap while the peloton was struggling without any order on the front, it worked perfectly into the hands of the break who ended up staying away. ?Thomas ended up finishing 2nd out of a 3 man group that had split from 6, and Rico ended up 2nd in the bunch kick (5th on stage). ?While Thomas is a little disappointed to be so close to a win, the team in all are overly happy with today’s results. ?And me, I was just happy to be able to do something in the race, the past 4 stages I have felt pretty frustrated just sitting in, so today it was good to be able to test the legs a little. Tomorrow is the first of the 200km + stages, the next 3 days are going to be pretty long but I’m pumped and ready to go with a little more confidence after today. Until tomorrow! Cam 2014 Le Tour de Langkawi: Stage 5 Results
