Fantastic March for Team CSC
[01.04 21:06] March has been and gone and it turned out to be a month to remember for Team CSC with great performances and a number of brilliant results throughout the month. All in all nine victories and some of them in the biggest profiled races of the month.
Because of numerous training camps Team CSC hadn't done that many actual races during the first couple of months of the year and as a result the team was ranked as low as 15th on Cycling Quotient's list of points for the new year (the same list as the old World Rankings list from the UCI.) But March was about to change all that and Team CSC is now back in the driver's seat as number one – the way it's been for the last three years.
"Yeah, it's been a great month for us. We got off to a late start compared to some of the other teams, because we thought the training camps were more important and our results in March just go to prove that we had our priorities right. But we do have a strong team and – knock on wood – haven't had any serious accidents or injuries so far," says sports director Kim Andersen.
Juan José Haedo was responsible for the two first victories, when he won Clasica de Almeria as well as a stage in Vuelta Ciclista a Murcia – both in Spain. The Argentinean reached five victories in one season – just one victory from his record of six in his debut season with Team CSC in 2007. This is very promising for the remainder of Haedo's season.
Last year Team CSC's Alexandr Kolobnev won the very first pro-edition of the Italian race Monte Paschi Eroica, which is already becoming a neo-classic. This made it even better, when the team made a repeat performance and won the race again this year, when Fabian Cancellara left everyone behind and embarked on his very own victory spree with four in March alone.
A week later Cancellara won the time trial in Tirreno-Adriatico and with a solid all round performance he even managed to grab the overall victory in the prestigious Italian stage race.
A few days later Team CSC lined up for the start in a race, which has always been a bit difficult to achieve any major results in with the types of riders the team's had throughout the years, Milano-Sanremo. But that changed also, when Cancellara again took matters into his own hands and dropped everyone on the descent from Poggio towards the finish line in Sanremo. An absolutely fantastic performance – and a very typical one for the strong Swiss rider.
"I've got no doubts that it's our training camps – especially the one in the States – which have made all the difference. I hadn't expected to win Tirreno, but it was still Milano-Sanremo, which meant the most for me," says Fabian Cancellara in an interview, which can be heard in its full length on the Team CSC Official Fan Club. Cancellara explains how he managed to arrive at, what he himself considers his best March form ever.
Further west came the culmination of a string of great performances from Karsten Kroon, when he took a well-deserved victory in Vuelta a Castilla y Leon in the stage to Avila, which he had targeted beforehand.
This past weekend was the final race of the month and Team CSC continued to perform. Kurt-Asle Arvesen completed a perfect tactical effort by the entire team, when the Norwegian crossed the finish line solo in E3 Prijs Vlaanderen and following that was, what you might be tempted to call “Team CSC's very own race” – Criterium International – a race which the team has won five times in a row now. Yet again it was Jens Voigt, who pulled his famous stunt and went off in a break during a hilly "morning stage." This was Voigt's fourth victory in this particular race. |
