By Cam Bayly ??@cameronbayly It’s almost 11pm and I’ve only just sat down to type this blog out, so please excuse me if it’s a little under par today, I’m pretty tired. The race didn’t start until 3pm today, so we were pretty bored all morning just playing games, making excess amounts of coffees, and just doing anything we could to kill some time. ?Finally it was time to head on over to the race, only to find we under estimated the time to get to the stage start by car. ?But that was ok, we had a police car to escort us through every red light and to help us over take all the traffic along the way. ?It saved us so much time we ended up being early! So now it was race time, I was hiding in the shelter close to the start line until the last possible moment before the race, as it was a darn hot one today. ?Starting the race at the hottest time of the day definitely didn’t help the cause. ?After 4km of neutral the flag dropped, as usual there was plenty of attacks from the start, I was getting amongst it just in case something was to slip away. ?I found myself in a 4 man break reasonably early on, and decided to jam it pretty hard in hope that the gap would stretch out enough that the bunch would let us go. ?We had a good gap for a while, but TPT weren’t going to let us go and pulled us back in no time. ?The next move to go straight after was a 2 man move and this time the peloton was happy to let it go, well let it go to 2 minutes, but no more. ?As soon as the gap got to 2 minutes TPT got on the front and started to ride pretty hard. ?We had a headwind again today and every now and then it would change to a slight cross wind when the road turned, but TPT still managed to sit on close to 50kph and bring the gap down quite rapidly. I was hurting a fair bit today, I think I was a little fatigued from the previous 8 days, but the pace was definitely on for the shorter 110km stage today. ?With about 40km to go the gap was brought down to just under a minute and TPT decided to let Belkin and Astana chase for the rest of the stage. ?This was quite a relief for me, as the pace actually dropped a bit once the pro teams got to the front. Coming down to the pointy end of the race we all got around Rico, to help him move up and keep him sheltered whenever possible. Everything was going as planned, until with about 2km to go there’s a crash and unfortunately for the second day in a row Rico is involved. ?Broken handlebars, helmet, sunnies and a ripped up carbon speed suit but at least Rico wasn’t any worse than some solid grazing. ?I managed to pull up in time with no harm, so I helped him and his bike up and we rolled across the line behind the bunch. As soon as I crossed the line I had a UCI chaperone follow me to tell me I had to do a drug test, he didn’t leave my side until I was finished my testing. ?I am really glad to see that they are doing quite a bit of anti doping here. ?However as far as I know it is only urine testing, not blood testing as well. ?I’m a firm believer that at this level they should be doing blood testing and even a biological passport as well as urine testing. ?I believe that by starting this at a Continental level it would get rid of a lot of problems before they are even started. ?There is still big money to be made in some of these asian tours, for example Qinghai lake which had a prize total somewhere between $500,000 and $700,000 USD, if riders were to dope at this level and take prize money from clean riders, then it really just is robbery. I’m not saying that there are people that are doping, but if there were then I’d want them to be kicked out of the sport before they can progress any further. ?I know it would be very expensive for the UCI, but it is where it all starts and I believe it is the best place to stop it. After my testing was done, I rode back to the hotel, quick shower and straight down to dinner. ?By the time dinner was done it was team meeting time, hand washing clothes time (Laundromat’s are closed prayer day) and then a massage. ?Before I know it, It’s now almost 12am and I’m just about falling asleep, so I best be off to bed! Until tomorrow! Cam
