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Christian Vande Velde time trials into Tour of Missouri lead

Published: Sep. 10, 2008
Tour of Missouri, stage 3: Vande Velde took the win and the jersey.
Tour of Missouri, stage 3: Vande Velde took the win and the jersey.
Photo: Casey B. Gibson

Racing just a few hundred miles from his team sponsor’s headquarters, Garmin-Chipotle rider Christian Vande Velde won the Tour of Missouri’s difficult stage 3 time trial and is poised to take overall victory when the race finishes in St. Louis on Sunday.

Vande Velde clocked the 18-mile time trial in 39:51, 21 seconds faster than three-time world time trial champion Michael Rogers of Columbia. Canadian national time trial champion Svein Tuft (Symmetrics) capitalized on the form that saw him finish seventh at the Olympic time trial in Beijing to finish third, 33 seconds off Vande Velde’s time.

Last year’s overall champion, Columbia’s George Hincapie, finished fourth, 1:03 off the winning time, with national time trial champion Dave Zabriskie (Garmin-Chiptole) rounding out the top five, 1:10 down.

“It was a surprise,” said Vande Velde, who started one minute before Rogers. “I wasn’t 100 percent confident the way I had been feeling the last week or two. I didn’t ride great at nationals, and yesterday [Rogers] did a lead-out [for teammate Mark Cavendish] that just killed my morale. It was a surprise to win, but I rode the course this morning and liked it a lot. It motivated me to do a big ride today. I knew I had Mick behind me, and that’s a big motivation, too. Before the race I was scared he would catch me.”

Tour of Missouri, stage 3: Rogers takes second
Tour of Missouri, stage 3: Rogers takes second
Photo: Casey B. Gibson

The ride was a return to glory of sorts for Rogers, who spent nearly a year out of competition, beginning with a horrible crash that took him out of the 2007 Tour de France while he was virtual leader on the road. That injury was followed by a diagnosis of the Epstein-Barr virus that sidelined the Aussie until this year’s Dauphine Libere.

“It wasn’t the best year for me,” Rogers said. “Crashing out of the Tour after having a good chance for yellow was definitely bad for my morale. My wife and I had twin girls, and that’s been tough as well. And then I had my illness. When you think it’s almost one year I was out of competition, it’s hard to come back. In modern cycling it’s not easy to do that. It’s been a victory of sorts to me to come back into condition. There are a lot of steps for me to make to try to put yellow back on at the Tour de France.”

Though there are still four stages remaining in Missouri, without any decisive climbs and in the absence of any more time trials, even Rogers admitted that it is unlikely that he will be able to make up the deficit he lost to Vande Velde.

“The race is not over yet, but it’s going to be hard to change the GC a lot, because there is no decisive mountainous terrain,” Rogers said. “We’ll have to look at the wind conditions, and the time bonuses available. It would be no easy feat. But we do still have a lot more to win with Cavendish. We’ll see how it plays out.”

An overall victory would be a welcome change for the Garmin team, which finished second overall at last year’s Tour of Missouri (Will Frischkorn), and followed up with second overall at the Amgen Tour of California (David Millar), Tour de Georgia (Trent Lowe), Tour of Utah (Blake Caldwell) and the national road championship (Caldwell).

In all Garmin-Chipotle took four of the top nine spots on the day, and now leads the team GC by 2:28 over Columbia.

And though Vande Velde put in an impressive ride, falling just 14 seconds short of Levi Leipheimer’s 2007 ride of 39:37 on the same course held in similar mild conditions, it wasn’t a day entirely for Garmin-Chipotle to celebrate.

Caldwell, perhaps the biggest revelation of the 2008 domestic calendar, exited the race in an ambulance when his front tire blew out on the course’s fastest corner, off a descent. After breaking through this year with a stage win and second overall at the Tour of Utah and second in a photo finish to Tyler Hamilton at the national road championship, Caldwell’s season ended in Branson with a broken clavicle, a broken sternum, a fracture to his iliac wing (hip bone) and minor lung contusions.

“He blew out his front tire and yard-saled,” Vaughters said. “It’s especially tough for him. With a lot of these young guys, we finally get them around to where they are starting to break through, and then something like this happens.”

Losing Caldwell was not only a blow to team morale, but also to the team’s objective of defending the jersey over the next four days. Instead, riders such as Zabriskie, Danny Pate, Steven Cozza and Tom Danielson — all within 1:51 of Vande Velde — are expected to man the front of the peloton, keeping breakaways in check and jumping into moves as necessary.

With sharp climbs punctuating the course, including the final few hundred meters, Vande Velde described the course as “brutal.”

“Everyone told me that it was really hard,” he said. “Levi said it last year, that it was the hardest time trial he’s ever done. I would have to agree. You just have to see it to believe it.”

While Tuft said he rode a 55/44 chainring setup with an 11-23 cassette, Vande Velde rode 53/42 rings on the course, despite the encouragement from Garmin-Chipotle manager Jonathan Vaughters to go bigger.

“Jonathan wanted me to go with a 55,” Vande Velde said, adding that he coasted on some of the downhills to recover from the hard uphill efforts.

The rolling course put the hurt on a number of riders and, as expected, thoroughly shook up the general classification, with the sprinters being bumped from the top of the list. Race leader Mark Cavendish finished a respectable 41st on the stage, 4:09 off Vande Velde’s time.

Both Tuft and Toyota-United director Scott Moninger agreed that Columbia would likely focus on taking stage wins with Cav’s seemingly unbeatable sprint rather than spend its energy trying to unseat Vande Velde, with Moninger saying, “If I were Columbia I’d got for five stage wins on the week.”

Tuft said that strategy made the most sense, and would work well for Symmetrics’ overall objectives.

“I see Garmin able to control and doing what they need to, and Columbia taking over at finish with a guy like Cavendish,” Tuft said. “That works well with us. Andrew Pinfold is moving up in the sprint finishes every day, so we will protect our third on GC and go for better finishes.”

However Cavendish said he thought the team could still accomplish both tasks.

“I think we can go for both,” Cavendish said. “Garmin has done nothing all week to keep the race together, it’s been up to us, now it’s up to them. That can play to our advantage both for stage wins and for the GC. We’ve got a few options. Marco [Pinotti] didn’t do as well as we’d hoped, but at least we’ve got two options now.”

With Garmin representatives attending the race from the company's headquarters, located in Olathe, Kansas, Vande Velde said his Garmin teammates knew they had their work cut out for themselves, and would hold off from celebrating until the race was over on Sunday.

“We have to do a lot of work now,” Vande Velde said. “Columbia did the work the first two days. That’s more of our role now. The team will have to chaperone me to the front and close down big breakaways. The biggest thing is just to be smart. Here in Missouri it’s undulating all the time. There are no decisive climbs, but it’s always up and down. We’ll have to be on point at all times.”

Race Notes:
Three riders were eliminated by the time cut: Elliott Cervantes (Tecos); Sterling Magnell (Rock Racing) Justin Williams (Rock Racing).

Toyota-United’s Dominique Rollin, the rider with perhaps the biggest thighs in the Tour of Missouri peloton, continues to wear the race’s King of the Mountains jersey he took on stage 1 by powering up a pair of small rollers. No KOM points were on offer during stages 2 or 3, however Thursday’s stage 4 offers three KOM points.

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