Tag: Drifter Ski

So this is my first blog post from across the pond aka stateside aka the USA writes Dan Patten. Despite everything tending to be bigger here in the US, I intend to keep my blog postings shorter and more frequent this year (well this is the plan!). It's been a little over 3 weeks now since I took off from London Heathrow. A smooth flight to Philadelphia was followed by some airport time before another flight onto Greensboro, North Carolina...

As a ‘road captain’ in the 80's and 90's Mario Chiesa helped guide riders like Marco Pantani, Urs Zimmermann and Claudio Chiappucci to some big victories. More recently he’s been behind the steering wheel of nine top teams. Thanks to Lucio Belli, we caught up with Mario to get his story. 

So I'm back after a 2 night lay-off with a bit of a 'lergy-talk about bad timing! Last night sounded like a brilliant finale (although Gilbert winning is hardly a surprise). I can't wait to see what happens next in this race - the Team Time Trial is on tonight, and consequently there are a bunch of teams who are riding for a chance to hold the yellow jersey. Gilbert holding on by 3s over Cadel, and 6s over at least one bloke from every other team that can put together a decent TT means that the boys will be putting it all on the line in the hope of holding the yellow jersey at the end of the day.

At VeloVeritas we pride ourselves on keeping an eye on who’s on the way up – but this gentleman caught us unawares. We should have spotted that stage win in the 2011 Tour de l’Avenir – there are no ‘soft’ stage wins in that race. So when 20 year-old Simon Yates took the rainbow jersey in the Worlds points race it shouldn’t really have been a surprise. But the man from Bury has been a World Champion before, with Dan McLay in the junior madison in 2010 – he was also silver medallist in the junior team pursuit that year.

Nico Mattan was in the DFL team car with Evan at the Tour of Britain 2007, having his first taste of Kendal mint cake when I rang on Friday; we'll hear more wisdom from Nico later, but he did like the mint cake. Nico does love his beer. He DNF'd today, so will likely be home enjoying a lovely cold Leffe Blonde as you read this.

The ANC saga continues, albeit Mr. Vern Hanaray maintains that he wasn’t really the mechanic with the team, he ‘just washed the bikes then passed them to a real mechanic.’ But before he donned his Wellington boots and picked up a sponge he wasn’t at all bad on a bike himself; three times champion of New Zealand and a winner of major events in the UK, Netherlands and Belgium.