Evanston (Sunday)

For Sunday's criterium we headed back down to the Chicago area to the suburb of Evanston, IL. There was a huge showing for Sunday's race in both fans and riders. I'd say this was one of the biggest fields we had raced against in Superweek, and that, in combination with a couple tight turns and a nearly a dozen poorly situated man-hole covers made for a pretty sketchy race. The race was stopped twice because of bad crashes (situations where the rider(s) does not get up right away and then nobody wants him to move until the ambulance gets there...so he just lays in the street); we were first stopped for 15 or 20 min with 16 laps to go which was actually fine with me because I had just gotten caught from going off the front trying (unsuccessfully) to get a prime, so it allowed me time to recover. When that crash happened, with 17 to go, Oscar was on my wheel and I was on the wheel of the guy who wrecked.....basically, I think he took the corner too wide and might have been blinded by the bright setting sun and ended up running into the outside curb/barrier which sent his bike flying up and back out onto the road right in front of me! I kind of ducked and swerved to avoid the back half of his bike which was right at eye level in front of me, and Oscar and I both escaped alive.

The second stoppage of the race occurred after a wreck with 5 or 6 laps to go. After a long 20 min intermission we were back on the road and they had bumped the lap counter up to 10 laps to go so they would have time to finish handing out primes. I was feeling really good in the closing laps and was able to fight for and maintain position close to the front. I passed a few people in the sprint but not as many as I would have liked to or could have had it been more wide open. The next day however, when we looked at results, I was not listed..... I think it may have been because I finished on the opposite side of the road than the camera was on so I may have been blocked by other riders. By then, most of the checks had already been handed out and there wasn't much I could do about the wrong results.

Thomas was feeling pretty worn out from all the racing and didn't finish Evanston, and Oscar was in good form towards the end but just never really made it up to the front to contest the sprint or attack.