JENNINGS SHOWS HIS CLASS BY UPSTAGING BIG PRO TEAMS
Written By Raleigh | Date 2010-02-01
Christopher Jennings, the reigning South African Junior Road Cycling Champion, upstaged the big professional teams at the weekend when he put on a classy display to ride away from the country’s top professionals and win the Berge en Dale Super Classic in Krugersdorp.
Now in his first year in the Under-23 category, Jennings, who turns 19 on Friday, is racing for the Toyota–Cycling South Africa Development Academy team. He timed his solo attack perfectly, making his move with 40km of the 97km race remaining.
Team Medscheme’s Hanko Kachelhoffer and Jaco Ferreira of Team Computer Smith finished second and third respectively.
“To be honest didn’t think I’d stay away. I thought someone might ride across to me, but they didn’t. The first time I got given a time gap I had a one minute, 20 second lead. That gave me the motivation to go harder,” explained Jennings.
Jennings agreed that the absence radios helped him in his victorious ride on Saturday. The International Cycling Union (UCI) has begun to implement a ban on radio communication between riders and their team cars in an effort to make racing more intuitive and less predictable and 2010 marks the beginning of the initiative, which has largely met with resistance from professional teams.
“Without radios it is a lot more difficult to gather information on breakaways. Today that worked in my favour a little. What was also in my favour was that the route was quite undulating with lots of turns, so I was out of sight of the bunch a lot, making it harder for them to focus on the chase,” said Jennings.
Jennings said that with nine kilometres remaining, he got a final time gap from his manager, Barry Austin, who was able to drive up alongside him.
“Barry said that I had 45 seconds and that’s when I knew I’d have a good chance of staying away, but I still pushed as hard as possible to make certain. It wasn’t the biggest win of my career, but it was a good confidence boost with SA champs just three weeks away.”
The Medscheme and MTN Energade teams did the bulk of the chasing the final 20km, but their effort was inconsistent, allowing Jennings to pull off the win.
In 2009, Jennings made history when he became the first South African junior male to win a top-rated UCI race after he captured the honours on the final stage of the Tour de Pays de Vaud in Switzerland.
In the Berge en Dale Super Classic women’s race, Biogen Toyota’s Ashleigh Moolman claimed a rather hollow victory after the lead break of four riders was misdirected in the final stages of the race.
Cherise Taylor (Nashua Telecoms), Joanna van der Winkle (Biogen Toyota), Robyn de Groot (MTN Energade) and Lylanie Lauwrens (MTN Energade), held more than a two-minute lead over the main pack when an errant lead vehicle led them off course. They returned to the correct route more than 10 minutes behind their rivals, leaving Moolman the opportunity to win her second race in successive weeks.
