Julian Dean Diary

By Julian Dean
Jul 4, 2004, 22:31

Tour de France - Stage 1: People, Nerves, Stress...

Holly shit, it’s stressful. Everyone is nervous, everyone wants to be at the front and no-one wants to crash and they’ll all do whatever it takes. I would’ve thought that it would be easier than this as the roads we’re on are always so big, but there are so many spectators who come right out onto the road to watch us go by. It’s almost like the bloody idiots want to see how close they can get to us. It must give them a buzz or something. So many times I saw near misses as the riders whizzed past the spectators. It was pretty frightening.

The atmosphere was pretty amazing though as we hurtled along the roads which were more or less lined from start to finish with people. Although for much of the day, it was raining, we were full tilt from the get go. We had the objective to try and get Thor in the yellow jersey as he was only 10secs down. With three sprints with 6sec, 4sec and 2sec and 20secs 10secs and 6secs at the finish, it was very possible. He won one sprint and I had to help him as best I could at the finish. Our plan was for me to sprint early from about 500m and go as long as I could with Thor to come off me at around 200m to go. It went almost perfectly. It was a little uphill at the finish and he just got pipped at the line. Not disappointing though. It was good work from me and him. He never took enough seconds for the jersey but we’ll have another try again tomorrow. He is only 2 seconds down now.

I was feeling ok. I was suffering a little at the start when the rain was hammering us but I felt good at the end. I am a bit bummed I can’t do the sprints for myself as I’m feeling very fast. But that’s cycling and I just have to do as I’m directed from my team – after all, what I did today is what I came here for.

Julz

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