It was a very warm evening yesterday, and we wandered back round to the hotel last night after our dinner in the middle of a typical Pyrenean thunderstorm - huge bolts of lightning searing across the sky and claps of thunder which lingered and reverberated for what seemed like 20 seconds. In the space of 5 minutes, the roads were flooded. We went to sleep in our "pod" room to the sound of pouring rain, and woke up to the same - only worse. It wasn't a nice day to be outside, let alone reporting on, or riding, a bike race.
The weather was glorious on Sunday morning in Oviedo. After liberating the car from the car park - at huge expense - we were off, and stumbled right onto race route. The direction arrows made life very easy as we followed the whole 100 mile parcours. Race route ran through El Padrun, a tiny hill top village, in fact it was the first classified climb of the day. Four years ago, Davie and I stumbled upon El Padrun whilst searching for the Angliru.
John Archibald has ‘done the business’ when it comes to qualifying for the individual pursuit at the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, Australia come the spring. But Scotland has another young man chasing qualification for those lung shredding four kilometres, Mr. Kyle Gordon; we had a word with him after his recent adventures in Europe.
Daryl Impey is the man who suffered a horrific crash in the final metres of the Presidential Tour of Turkey in 2009, with the yellow jersey on his back - when Theo Boss decided that the South African might like to make a close inspection of the crash barriers.
The third day, and it's the big one, your actual Saunier Duval Team Launch 2007. I wrote-up my Gianetti and Ventoso interviews in the room first thing then came down for some grub. You can read the interview with Franciso here.
In 2005, Nico Mattan grabbed victory in one of the most controversial editions of Gent – Wevelgem ever held. The newspapers ran and ran with it but Sean Kelly saw “no problems” with the result.