Tour of the Gila; Stage 4, Downtown Silver City Criterium

By Eddie Clark

Lewis and Hughes take stage wins in a field sprint.

(April 30, 2011) SILVER CITY, NM—The festivities on tap for Saturday were easily a town favorite with tight and fast criterium racing held on a four corner course covering 1.08 miles in historic downtown Silver City.  Numerous vendors and bands were out along with a large following from the local community to take part in the endeared spectator friendly event.  Weather wise, it was a perfect day with moderate winds that whipped up the speeds with a tailwind for the highly watched downhill left hand corner onto Bullard Street.

Starting at 3pm, the Pro Women lined up for 25 laps around the downtown course with a very large contingent of spectators cheering them on.  Even though there was a solid field of capable women, the attacks were few and short lived as the Peanut Butter & Co Twenty12, Diadora Pasta Zara, and Colavita teams successfully marked each other and any attackers resulting in the field mostly riding together from start to finish. 

Once again Canadian Clara Hughes (Pactimo) uncorked another impressive performance by taking a hotly contested field sprint over second place Lauren Tamayo (Peanut Butter & Co Twenty12) and third place Patuzz Eleonora (Diadora-Pasta Zara). 

For the main event, the Pro Men lined up at 4pm to race around the course for 40 laps.  From the gun, Team Pure Black started sending riders off the front, and easily accounted for some of the most aggressive racing of the day as they never relented in trying to establish breakaways with several of their top riders launching attackes throughout the entire race. 

Unfortunately, teams such as RealCyclist.com, Kenda 5-Hour Energy, Jamis Sutter-Home, and Garmin would have nothing to do with letting a breakaway get any time on the pack unless one of their riders were present in the breakaway.  Regardless, the fans loved it, and it made for plenty of exciting racing that slowly wore down the field riding at the back until they popped and were pulled from the race before being lapped.

Ironically, the race bible noted the main hazards for racers as being the rough streets and errant pedestrians.  Fortunately, the rough roads were not a problem and the errant pedestrians must have stayed in the bars, but of all things, the lap counter presented the largest challenge to teams lining up their sprint trains with 2 laps to go.  For whatever reasons, a delay with the lap counter resulted in the field being told there was only one lap to go when in fact there were still two.  RealCyclist.com, and Jamis Sutter-Home fared the worst as the confusion saw them doing two sprints. 

Riding near the front at most times, but tucked into the main field was Trek-LIVESTRONG Australian racer Joe Lewis who used some tips from the extremely capable and successful Pro Tour sprinter Robbie McEwen who is riding for Radio Shack this season.  “Robbie has been giving me some pointers on field sprints, and so coming into the last corner I was seventh wheel and let a slight gap open up before the corner so I could take a faster line into it and have some more speed than the others to finish the sprint" Lewis said.  Lewis’ tactics worked perfectly as he shot by the lead sprinters to narrowly take the win over Allajandro Barrado (Jamis Sutter-Home) and Aaron Kemps (Fly-V Australia) whom finished second and third respectively.