So last week we did ok in the TT (but we did see France getting close with their great group of flat-TT-specialists). This week we had the E3-Harelbeke to ride and again the French looked like a formidable opponent, with the mighty Jean Perret amongst them.
Without any gold cobble/hiller our only choice was to make use of our big number of riders that were close together in strength (and the luck of 3 good weather bonuses and 1 double bonus), so we decided to try and force something in the first section. Our leader Maarten Heitinga rode with a 11235 strategy, but quite a few of his domestiques started aggressive. This worked quite ok, because we had our 9 riders in the lead group of 60. Section 2 and 3 we aimed for saving some energy without really losing contact and that also worked amazingly well. The Australians did make it a tough ride in S3, but it looked like the final push from one of the domestiques, so we let them go a little bit.
Niles Judd was still going for it to try and bring home an Aussie victory in S4, but we were positioned nicely with 2 guys controlling his escape just 4 seconds behind and our leader in the next group with another domestique only 9 seconds from the lead. Heitinga then had enough strength left to jump over the riders still in front of them to bring home a nice victory, just ahead of Jean Perret who didn't have the luxury of some help in S4. Three of our domestiques ended up between 10th and 16th spot for some extra points, so after this stage we increase our lead over France to 235 points.
Next week the Leeds Classic, let's hope we can again achieve a solid result.
