When a race gets compared to the oldest major cycling race in the United States, organizers are definitely on to something.
On Saturday night on the historic streets of Ladner village, American Shane Kline parallels between the Tour de Delta's Brenco Criterium, and the Tour of Somerville, which takes place each May in New Jersey.
Much like the Tour of Somerville, the 60 lap, 54 kilometre Brenco Criterium is super-fast, exciting and can be dangerous, with riders hitting speeds upwards of 60 km/h. Kline, whose family owns a carpentry business and is just a comfortable making a custom piece of furniture as he is riding a bike, claimed his second podium finish of the weekend after finishing second in Friday's MK Delta Lands Criterium in North Delta.
After the race, the native of Bally, Pennsylvania, acknowledged the speed of the course and was quick to credit his Team SmartStop Pro Cycling drew teammates for the victory.
"It's really reminiscent of the notorious Tour of Somerville course back on the East Coast and it's one of those races you can kind of just hang out at the back," he explained. "Believe it or not, it's pretty easy to float the course so you can save a lot of energy and that's just what I did for the first half of the race, just really banked on it being a field sprint and it ended up being one and I had the legs."
If jet lag affected the second place finisher, it certainly didn't show, as Sebastian Molano of Team Columbia came in behind Kline. The finish is even more sweet considering that Molano and his team left Columbia on Friday and didn't land in Vancouver until less than five hours before the race started.
"We're mostly track racers, but we do some road races and we're training for the Tour de l'Avenir in France next month," said Molano through a translator.
In Sunday's White Spot men's road race on the streets of Tsawwassen, U.S. rider Jesse Anthony of Optum p/b Kelly Benefit Strategies broke away from a peloton with two kilometres to go and wound up with a seven second lead in claiming the victory.
Team Optum had riders near the front of the pack for the entire race and it looked like they were locked into a groove covering the 13 lap 151-kilometre course. "The team was on point all day, we rode at the front, we were aggressive, but I think we rode really smart and brought a really strong team with (runner-up and North Vancouver native) Ryan Anderson - one of the fastest sprinters here, so it's always great to have the speed in the field and it lets us race a little bit more abandoned," continued Anthony, a native of Beverly Massachusetts.
The race was a bit of a roller coaster with breaks always forming and being caught and the peloton changing in size a number of times. Anthony noted that his team relied on previous experience to pull out the win.
"We were communicating a little bit, but we have a really experienced team and it makes a big difference when you get in a race like this when things are constantly shuffling, it's going back and forth, the groups are coming together and breaking apart, and everyone (on our team) just knows what to do," he explained. "We were really keying off each other and we were able to see how we were riding and how the other teams were riding, so I think we were all just on point today and that makes a big difference."
