Last weekend marked Shortis.com.au cycling team’s first Nation Road Series Tour - The Tour of Toowoomba. Mark Frendo was unable to start due to injury, however, that wasn’t enough to prevent the team from mixing it up throughout the weekend.
The lineup for this tour included Matty Werrell, Benny Cutajar, Brenban Brooks, Matty Marshall, Luke Cridland with Brett Bundle as team manager. It was Luke Cridlands first appearance for the team aswell and first race for the season, so the weekend proved to be more of a form finder for Crito. |
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The tour began with what was previously anticipated as “the easy stage” that soon changed as cross winds, gravel sections and an abundance of high speed crashes came into play midway through the stage. Matty Werrell and Ben Cutajar did their job well by keeping the small and vulnerable Matty Marshall sheltered and out of trouble when the hammer went down in the gutter. There work resulted in getting the team’s GC rider across the line in the front bunch. |
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The teams “opportunist rider” Brendan Brooks decided to take charge by making himself known in a promising break which established a third of the way though the stage. It was not to be for Brendan “Brooksy” Brooks as the break was brought back during the final hour of the stage. Matty Marshall then made a move by slipping over one of the final K.O.M’s in a bunch of riders which separate themselves from the rest of the field and finished the stage well clear of the peloton |
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Stage 3 was the penultimate stage of the tour with an extremely steep and technical decent shortly followed by an equally steep hill top finish at the end of the stage. After two days of wall to wall blue sky Toowoomba decided it would make things interesting by turning on the rain and nearly putting the temperature into single figures. The high speed decent was made even sketchier as the riders were forced to navigate their way down tight bends in the wet. Sure enough, a large group of riders including our own Luke Cridland hit the deck coming into the fist hair pin corner which forced him to retire. The rest of the team fortunately managing to weave their way through the carnage unscathed but slightly separated from the front bunch. It was then that Brooksy made the superman effort to get Matty Marshall across to the front bunch and set him up for the hill top finish were Matty then climbed into 7th on GC during the solid accent.
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Things were not quite over for the boys after the final road stage. They still had to back it up with the Queens Park Criterium in the afternoon. It was a fast circuit with a mixture of both downhill and uphill sections. All of the team featured in the final stage by getting involved at the pointy end of the race. Brooksy got so involved that he was required to participate in doping controls after the race |
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| The Tour of Toowoomba was a bit of a warm up for the team having being the first Nation Series race of the season, it was a good opportunity to start getting the legs race fit for bigger tours latter in the season. |
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| view previous race reports |
