Patrick McCarty's Le Transalsace Diary

FRANCE (August 25, 2003) -- Le Transalsace is one of the more interesting races of the year. And by interesting I mean difficult.

Le Transalsace is in the French Alsace region, which lies in the Northeastern part of the country between Strasbourg and Mulhouse. Basically, it is a big valley between two mountain ranges so of course the race consists of field sprints and mountaintop finishes.

The race has always started off our fall campaign with a jolt. We’ve had a pretty good history of crashes in the race and unfortunately, this year was no different. Saul Raisin went down in a nasty pile-up 5km into stage 2 and was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

We thought it might be bad when they stopped the entire race and we were getting less than optimistic comments about our teammate from the race commissaries. We all waited for good News as the race started again and we rode at a training pace for about 30km before the speed picked up and the attacks came.

After a crash that bad, I guess no one was willing to push the pace, for a few minutes anyways. The good word about Saul finally came as Noel, our director, got back into the caravan and got on the radio. Saul had broken some of his teeth, cut the inside of his mouth really bad, and bruised up the entire left side of his face. Well, that was good news compared to how we thought he might be after re-starting the race. He had no broken bones, and no other head injuries so he should be back racing in no time.

The next day, the most decisive of the race, went very well for the team. I won the stage, took the mountain jersey, and moved myself into 3rd place overall. It was a 120 km race that had about 35km total of climbing.

Over the first few smaller climbs I could tell I was feeling good so I bided my time and looked for a good moment to attack. About halfway up the first of two category 1 climbs, I saw my chance and went. I got a gap pretty quick and was able to hold it down the decent and to the bottom of the final climb. I didn’t think about it at the time I attacked, but there were about 37km remaining in the stage. Ouch! I rode strong and extended my lead to 1min 20sec over six chasers on the top of the final climb.

After the top there was no downhill, though. It was rolling for about 9km with the last 2km being steep uphill. I laid out everything I had taking advantage of every slight hill where I could better hold off the chasers. My gap hovered around 30 to 35 seconds when I finally got to the final 2km of climbing and knew I could win it. One of the riders from behind attacked their group and bridged about half the distance to me very fast. He stalled a bit and I knew I had just enough distance to hold him off so I put my hands up for the finest victory of my career.

The final stage was a tough one as well, but the Credit Agricole team set tempo for their rider in the lead and kept a lid on things all the way to the finish. I have to admit, I was ambitious at the start to attack and take the overall win, but halfway through the stage I felt my effort from the day before and damn near hit empty. So, I stayed in the wheels and kept my 3rd overall.

This Article Published 2003-08-25 13:49:51 For more information contact: