Director’s report from Johnny Weltz:
After most of our days up north with beautiful weather, today we had autumn. The rain started after 50km and lasted the whole day — it wasn’t warm either! The worst of it was that the roads turned very slippery. A lot of flat tired all day — us with five.
A break went after 25km with four riders. As all of the teams ere comfortable with that it gained 15 minutes before we and three other teams started the chase. It was a hard job in the conditions — Christian Meier and Martijn Maaskant worked most of it.
As we approached Liege the roads got worse, and in a turn Julian Dean and Svein Tuft went down, with Julian hurting his knee . With 18km to go the break was back and the attacks started again, the bunch splitted and Dan Martin flatted. The other guy’s kept the field together. With 2.5km to go at a round-about a huge crash happened — more than half of the bunch went down where a car accident had left some oil on the ground . Tyler Farrar and David Millar went down, and the final sprint was among just five riders!!!
All of our guys are more or less ok after today. Now we head to Spain.
