Pezcyclingnews: Amstel’15: Drinks On World Champ!



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Jan 3, 2005
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Race Report: Limburg, what a part of the world to have a bike race. The sun beaming down, the tree blossoms gleaming white, fiercely green grass and a sequence of knife-edge climbs that cut riders to the quick. The Amstel Gold is a race as good to look at as it is hard to ride. A war of attrition hammered out across a picture-postcard, spring landscape.Much has been made of the fact that Amstel Gold bullets up the Cauberg four times, but there is a shrapnel scatter of nasty ascents pockmarking the hills and ridges around Maastricht. I still have cold sweats over the Eyserbosweg, where I think I left part of a lung in 2008.Here’s how it went downDeciding that the safest place to be in one of the most notoriously tricky pro races (tight corners, road furniture, and plenty of **** on the tarmac if the weather is wet) are the day’s primary escapees: late substitute Laurens De Vreese for Astana, Jan Polanc (Lampre-Merida), Timo Roosen (LottoNL-Jumbo), a revitalised Linus Gerdemann (Cult Energy), MTN-Qhubeka’s Johann Van Van Zyl and Niki’s little bro’ Mike Terpstra (Team Roompot).The peloton acts like a weary parent who has just dropped behaviourally-challenged toddlers into a ball pit: turns its back, breaks out the newspaper’s Sunday supplements and lets them get on with it. The reluctant baby-sitters are BMC and Movistar, keeping the break in some sort of check, as the kilometers click by and the big climb sequence looms.The lead is six minutes...

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