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Today was the first stage of the Vuelta, 196km mostly flat going from Alajuela to Liberia. The stage had numerous crashes, one involving a taxi at the beggining of the stage.
Read Anton's report:
Today we started from San Jose at higher altitude and finished at the coast, passing thru small mountain range early on. I felt the heat as soon as we started to ride hard, and had hard time digging deep barely keeping up at the back of the field, but once we descended down I managed to recover and cool off. As per usual I rolled off the front in my 'supertack' with one other guy. At this point there was a breakaway up the road that I didn't know any precise information on. I knew it wasn't too far as it was in sight for most of the climb. The guy gave me two pulls and died... So I end up just riding hard on my own, towing him and picking up dropped riders off the breakways, which were either too tired or represented to contribute to my cause. I also kept getting mixed information on the situation as time-moto came rarely and the board was too confusing to read as there were like 5 groups on the road. So i was getting my information either from riders or the follow neutral car, in broken English. At first I was told only 1 guy left up the road, so I was motivated to chase, then they told me 5 men with 2 minutes up. Then as I was getting zero cooperation from my now group of 5 and about to abort the mission I was told the break was 6 min up, but we were 10 min ahead of Peloton, so figured we could sort of roll at least for top 10 finish with that gap. Turns out it was 10min from leaders to the peloton and I was somewhere down the middle. Few more riders came up from behind. Nearly got in the fight... some riders who a few of us would attack to get rid off would come right back up holding to their feed cars, so at the point i just lost it... They'd do it so blatant it wasn't even funny. three of us eventually broke clear, but once we were told the gap was bellow 3min to the peloton, we packed it in. So I've spent about 80km out 200km chasing and in retrospect should have aborted sooner. Having race radios must be nice...
On last 30km I missed another chase move, when i was still recovering, and not too concerned knowing it wasn't for the win. Finished off the stage on the positive note however, by winning the bunch kick for 11th place! Was shocked to find out that two leaders end up winning by 12min on us, while the peloton chase in final 60km wasn't slow by any means.... hmmm.
