Henk Vogels’
Diary, Stage 5 & 6
Friday’s Stage 5, which finished with a climb to Brasstown Bald Mountain, was all about making the time cut.
Ivan Dominguez and I dropped off with 40 km to go and rode in nice and easy. We got some really nice pushes from spectators
all the way up the climb. It was a really long day yesterday. My legs woke up really sore the next day. It was a really long
day in the saddle – probably one of the hardest days in American racing.
On today’s stage, we had to put used up our
whole Toyota-United team to bring back the three guys out front who were ahead by six minutes. There were some really strong
guys out front and we didn’t want to lay anything down to chance. So we started riding immediately. We worked together
with CSC and only caught them with 10 km to go.
After the chasers were brought back, it was up
to me, Ivan Stevic and Caleb Manion to get Ivan Dominguez in position. But Caleb had been doing some riding on the front,
so he wasn’t very fresh. Freddy Rodriguez, who won, showed he’s pretty good. Congratulations to him. He had to
play off some of the other teams because his team isn’t the strongest when it comes to having help in the sprint.
As for us, we did our best and it didn’t
work out today.
