Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team 2007

Stevic wins with a fist pump while Vogels (right) has time to celebrate as well.
St. Paul, Minn. - Ivan Stevic of the Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team captured the opening stage of the ninth annual Nature Valley Grand Prix Wednesday night by winning the Downtown St. Paul Criterium.

Stevic rebounded from a mid-race crash that sent him over the handlebars and onto the pavement coming into the first turn of the six-corner, six-tenths of a mile (1.1 km) course that the racers circled for 60 minutes.

“Two guys in front of me crashed and I lost control and went down,” Stevic said. “I got back up and I was pretty angry after that so the adrenaline was really flowing.”

Stevic was delivered to the finish line by teammates Henk Vogels, Caleb Manion and Sean Sullivan (pictured at right) in what Toyota-United Team Director Harm Jansen called “an impressive leadout.” Kirk O’Bee (Health Net presented by Maxxis) finished second and Jonathan Page (Nature Valley) was third.

“Henk (Vogels) was the last one to pull off and even he managed to finish fourth,” Jansen said.

The victory was Stevic’s fourth of the season and the 25th for Toyota-United in 2007. Just three days ago, Stevic won the Driveway Criterium in Austin, Texas, using another picture-perfect lead-out from Vogels.

“I was feeling pretty good before the crash,” Stevic said. “It helps that the guys were amazing and did more than a perfect job to help me tonight.”

Jansen said Toyota-United has every intention of keeping the yellow jersey of race leadership on Stevic’s back for the remainder of the five-day, six-stage race.

“We definitely want to protect the jersey,” Jansen said. “Tomorrow, we will be protecting Stevic and one or two of our other riders.”

Thursday’s stage is the 65.3-mile (105 km) Cannon Falls Road Race. The race starts and finishes at Cannon Falls, Minn., with a 5 p.m. start. Though it is a short race, Jansen cautioned that it will be made more difficult by five laps of a difficult 1.9-mile (3 km) finishing circuit.

“It’s going to be windy and the finishing circuits are pretty tough. That makes tomorrow’s race a tough one,” Jansen said.

Stevic, who won the final stage of the 2006 race, said he hadn’t even looked that far ahead.

“If it’s like last year’s course, it is pretty steep, short climbs,” he said. “No matter what, I think we have a strong team here so we’ll see how it goes.”

Labels: Harm Jansen, Henk Vogels, Ivan Stevic, Sean Sullivan