Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team 2007

The race plan today was to have some of the climbers be in the move and the guys who worked hard on the front yesterday to take the day off. Ivan Dominguez and I would ride easy and just make the time cut. We rode 50 km in the first hour (32 mph) and we went onto a small road and it sort of bottlenecked and that’s when 13 riders went up the road.

We didn’t have anyone in it – one of five teams who didn’t get in the move. Predictor-Lotto put its entire team on the front and got it up to between 60 and 65 kph and couldn’t bring it back. We really weren’t interested in helping bring it back after we’d done so much work the first two days so we decided not to chase. It was pretty much over from there. The guys are not too disappointed, but we threw our overall aspirations today.

If all the riders in the race would have had to have raced, I’d say we would have lost 40 riders to the time cut today. Not one of them had a flat. There’s quite a big difference in the riders in this field so it would have been a very, very hard stage.

As it was, I felt like the worst rider in the bunch today. I was just having a bad day. So I was pretty happy to just get to the finish.

We came into this tour to win stages. With the time trial and then Brasstown up next, I think we’ll have a very good chance to do something in the last two stages.