We arrive in Banff with a monster of a rain storm on our tail which let us know what we could expect for weather for the rest of our week. The first race of the 3 day stage race was the Prologue which was a 1.5km sprint up hill. Having pre road the hill the day before at an easy pace a few of us thought there was still another curve in the road when the finished came up so fast. The Trek girls had a good race though with a few in the top ten and Kristine getting a 4th place just ones hundreds of second off the podium.
Our next race was the Lake Louise road race. We found out the night before that the race had been shortened both for men and the women. The reason for this, wolves! Apparently there was a pack of wolves living at the far turn around and the park didn’t want a bunch of bike racers in that area. I think it would have been good motivation to go fast and not get dropped and be left to the wolves. The race now was only 66km and was in the pouring rain with temperatures at 5 degree making at lot of the racers miserable. The Race was neither very hard nor easy, it sat somewhere in the middle with a couple attacks but nothing every sticking. In the end it came down to a sprint finish with Trek taking a strong second place finish.
We had two races the next day, the ITT and crit. We were very lucky that the rain decided to take a break and stay dry for our ITT in the morning. The course for the time trial is a very pretty with rolling hills around the base of the mountains. Most years there is always a bunch of wildlife on the course but this year we didn’t see any. All the girls on Trek had very strong TT, with all in the top ten and Kristine taken the second spot finish.
For the Crit the plan was to go off hard and drop as many riders as we could right off the bat. That was also the plan of one of the other teams there as well. So the pace was set very high right off the gun and half the field was blown away in the first half a lap and was whittled down to only 9 riders in the front group by the second lap. All the four Trek girls in that group of nine were holding their own. There were lots of attacks but no one could ever break away. It came down to another sprint and Trek managed to grab a spot on the podium with a third place finish.
Overall Trek had a great week of racing with three podium placing out of four races. As well as a third place and fourth place in the GC.
Cheers
JG
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