This race is held in the French Basque country in mid February every year. Although the race route touches the Spanish border the race doesn’t actually go into Spain. The Essor Basque is a bit of a strange format. It is a week of races, either 4 or 7 races depending on how you look at it. All 7 races are international races, but the last 3 are ranked differently. The first 4 race (Sat, Sun, Tue, Thu) are 1.12.2 ranked races, which means there is no limit as to haw many international teams are allowed to race, but no UCI Division 1 or 2 Pro teams may enter. The last 3 races (Sat and Sun) are 2.5 races and have a separate overall classification. These are open to UCI 1 and 2 Pro teams. However, the rules stipulate that you have to enter a minimum of 6 riders, and a maximum of 12. Sadly, for 2004 Evolution was unable to get a 6 man squad, so we will only be doing the first 4 races with our 4 man squad.
Distance. All the races are around 100km, or a little more. They are either point to point or 1 or 2 big loops. The main difference riders based in the US will notice, is that here each team has a follow car. So these races really do take over the road. The Gendarme block off the roads, in order to allow the 200 + riders and all the team cars and follow vehicles in the caravan to pass safely.
The course. Each race is held in the South Western area of France, but they don’t all start and finish in the same town. The terrain is… well… seeing as it is near the Spanish border, and that there is a mountain range called the Pyrenees between France and Spain, I guess you could call the terrain “hilly”! These races are in February don’t forget. So many riders aren’t fully ready, and more importantly, the weather can be foul!
The competition: These are HARD races. In France especially, but also in quite a few other European countries, the amateur system is very structured. Most good amateur riders are paid to ride, and their teams often have more equipment and a bigger budget than Div 3 pro teams. Frequently, riders go straight from these 1.12.2 ranked races, to a Div 1 Pro team and ride the Tour de France the next year. So who will be there? A lot of good teams that most people won’t have heard of in the US. VC Roubaix, is a very strong northern team. They won’t mind the cold, wet and wind, neither will teams such as Vendee U (Brioche La Boulangere’s feeder team) or Nantes 44. VC La Pomme through Mark Scanlon at AG2R last year. The Russian National team usually puts in a good showing to say the least! The Canadian National team was based here last year, but I don’t know if they will be back to play in our yard this year. Then there are a lot of teams who field rider who where on Div 1 Pro teams, but either couldn’t get a new contract, or preferred to ride Amateur in France than leave their families and go race Pro on a foreign team outside of France (don’t forget, Amateurs get paid). This is the case for people like Olivier Azmaker (Montauban/CSC), Laurent Roux (Montauban/Jean Delatour (if he returns from his UCI drug suspension)), Benoit Luminet (CR4C Roanne), Cedric Coutouly (Credit Agricole), Philip Bordenave (AG2R), Laurent Estadieu (AG2R) the list is long and boring, but you get the picture.
This will be hard going for the Evolution international selection of 4 riders. If this is your first race of the year, it can be very hard getting used to riding in a 200 man platoon on tiny, narrow, wet and slippery roads. And believe me you don’t have much time to adapt. Riders attack from km 0 almost every day, and make the races so hard, that you can’t hide in the main field even if you want to, because the entire field is blown apart into small groups.
A hard week: The riders will all be staying in a hotel based as centrally as possible to all the races of the Essor Basque. Evolution will take 2 cars down, but will only use one as race support during the races. We are limited in Space, so each rider will only be able to take 1 bike, we will have a minimum of 2 pairs of spare wheels, and a bunch of spare clothes, food etc in the follow car. It is a 5 hour drive to these races, so we will obviously be going down the day before, and coming back the day after the races. We have to hope for some good weather, as cleaning and taking care of the bikes will be a difficult task. We tried to get a second support staff as soigneur/mechanic, but sadly he was unavailable. Another big difficulty will be language. Race radio is obviously in French, and we will be communicating in English in our team. So we needed to find someone who could speak both, and could drive our follow vehicle. It is in face very scary in a race caravan, these guys are NUTS in those team cars…
The riders: This is a selection of riders who will be representing Evolution during their time in France. Not all riders are permanently on the Evolution roster. This is an advantage of have a UCI License. Although not racing in the Essor Basque, we are very excited to have Swedish sprinter Johan Nyman joining us for some races during the summer. Johan has been a member of the Swedish national team since he was a little boy, he’s been ranked in the top 10 nationally for the past few years, and has been based in France for the past 3 years. Johan has this year decided to concentrate on his studies more, and will be joining us during the months of June, July and August.
Here are the riders who will be racing in February:
Steward Kidston
Simeon Green
Todd Roberts
Scott Gibbons
For the rest of the year, we may also have a few French riders joining us for certain events. But this will be decided as the year goes on.
Rider likely to join us are:
Bastien Labit
Christophe Cabot
Arnault Boulanger
We will be away and unable to send updates during the races, but we will post updates, race reports and pictures upon our return (last week of February).
Older race maps, routes and vertical profiles can be found here:
http://www.essorbasque.com/parcours.htm
current race routes and schedules for 3 of 4 can be found here:
http://www.essorbasque.com/etepe1crit2.htm
http://www.essorbasque.com/etape2crit2.htm
http://www.essorbasque.com/etape3crit2.htm
Basically to read these, you need to know the following: most of the details deal with team managers and where they need to be and when and where they are going to go and how long it will take them.
as an example see:
http://www.essorbasque.com/etape2crit2.htm
Information from the top:
Press availability and schmoozing from 10:00am to 1:00pm
Parking for race directors and officials is in the supermarket parking lot designated. The reunion directors sportif is the meeting between race officials, team directors, promoters, govt officials and publicity folks. By 1:45, all riders need to be dressed and ready and the car caravan need to be ready to go. The depart fictive corresponds to a neutral rollout. If you look at the other pages, you'll see that in some cases, there is a neutral rollout through the city that can last 10-15km. Below that is a schedule that lists all of the roads that will be taken, including distances and the estimated time it will take to get there. So to follow through, we leave at 2:00 pm (14:00h) from Cambo and pass through Louhossa. By 15:32, we will be in larcevea and have covered 55km. We continue looping around and eventually end up back at center city louhossa at 16:47 and km 106.
From there, it's a straight run into Cambo and a finish at km 134, 17:16h. this draft schedule has us covering 134 km in 03:16h or 25.8 mph. That's pretty bold, though I should note two things. First, and making things seem somewhat less intense, These packs are quite large and you've certainly had the experience of racing where you sit in the middle of the pack, trucking along. It's not nearly so bad. Jefferson cup last year was 50 miles and almost the same average speed, though for 2/3 of the distance. Second, most of those starting the event were listed as finishers. So there was not a lot of attrition. In addition, the finishing pack was huge so on can assume that finishing in the "pack" is a realizable goal.