Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team 2007

Ivan Dominguez signed autographs before Wednesday's stage.
Springfield, Mo. — The Toyota-United Pro Cycling Team saw its first-day race leadership at the Tour of Missouri evaporate when a 12-man breakaway went up the road early on in the 125-mile stage from Clinton to Springfield, Mo.
Without representation in the break, Toyota-United chased valiantly. But in the end, no other teams contributed to the effort and the team was left to stop its chase and converse energy for the remainder of the day.

“We did a lot of work yesterday with one rider [time] cut because they qualified yesterday’s stage as a flat stage, while it was hillier than today,” said Toyota-United director Harm Jansen in response. “(Sean) Sullivan is sick with asthma problems, (Ivan) Stevic has a bad knee and pulled out of the race, (Chris) Baldwin crashed twice, Dominguez is our leader and two of our riders left, (Justin) England and (Heath) Blackgrove are just spent from yesterday. So the only guy I had left was Chris Wherry and I’m not going to finish off that last piece of bread I have left on my plate."

Wherry said Toyota-United held to its responsibility as race leader to chase the break.

“When the break went up the road, we immediately had five guys on the front,” Wherry said. “Only one other team was helping us and their guys blew up pretty quickly, so we were left to do it. It wasn't a good move for everybody because not every team had its top GC riders in there. We did what we could for a while, but no other teams wanted to help us. So it was basically us against 11 other teams. Eventually we called it quits and hoped some teams would organize after that. It just didn’t happen.”