April 28/11 11:14 am - Tour of Turkey: Stage 5, Euser 6th

Posted by Editoress on 04/28/11
 

Most riders expected stage 5 - the longest of the Tour of Turkey, at 218 kilometres - to be an 'easy' day, after an extremely hard race the day before. However, that was not the case, as a series of attacks on the opening climb out of Denizli saw a group of ten form within the first 20 kilometres and then stay away to completely rearrange the GC.

Surprisingly, mixed among the low GC riders were three contenders - Tom Peterson (Garmin-Cervelo), Cameron Wurf (Liquigas-Cannondale) and Alexander Efimkin (Team Type 1-Sanofi Aventis). Also in the group was SpiderTech's Lucas Euser, who was well down on GC after a bad day on stage four, but made up for it with a strong result day in sixth place.

The NetApp squad of race leader Bartosz Huzarski either didn't take the group seriously, or didn't have the legs, but, regardless of the reason, they allowed the break to gain nearly 11 minutes, and then couldn't pull them back, resulting in Peterson taking over the race lead, with 27 seconds on Wurf, with Efimkin at 29 seconds.

The group went over nine minutes clear by the 60 kilometre mark, with Peterson and Wurf driving the pace whenever it faltered on the climbs, and was 10:40 ahead by the final climb of the day. This was still nearly 100 kilometres from the finish line, but it was mostly downhill and flat into the finish ay Fethiye, on the south coast.

The peloton seemed to be getting itself organized after the last climb, and pulled the leaders back to six and a half minutes with 35 kilometres to go, but then the impetus seemed to go out of them, especially with one of the main sprint teams - Garmin-Cervelo - not working, and the gap began to creep back up, eventually finishing up at nearly 12 minutes.

For the sprint, it was down to two riders, with Matteo Rabottini (Farnese Vini-Neri Sottoli) leading out from over 300 metres back, and just holding off Efimkin at the line.

Euser was hoping for better, but pleased with the result. "I wasn't feeling good yesterday, so finished well back, but I started to come around last night, and today was good. We were all expecting it to be an easy day, especially with that hard climb at the start, but the attacks started happening right away, so I thought I had better follow. Once we were clear, it rolled really well. I was hoping to do better in the finish, but I think I followed the wrong wheel."

For Tom Peterson, it is new territory, since he has never led a stage race before, but he and the team are confident. "It will take some major disaster for us to lose [the jersey] I think."

Team Spidertech powered by C10 has now moved up to 3rd in Team GC

Note: We will be publishing video interviews with Lucas, Ryan Anderson and Tom Peterson (if internet holds out - it is sporadic...)

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