Gieten is a bit of a question mark for me to be honest. It’s far up in the North of Holland, far from the ‘cross’ heartland, the course itself was incredibly bland and the spectator turnout wasn’t great either. I guess, there needs to be a Superprestige that’s not in Belgium, but there must be better options than that.

I got lucky yesterday when I chose to sit at the beginning of the finishing straight, as yesterday’s drama unfolded right in front of my eyes. Below you can find the photos I took and I let you judge who was right and who was wrong. What do you think?

This will be a short one as I’ve got hours of driving ahead of me to get to tomorrow’s Superprestige race at Gieten. Also, I got quite a few complaints that the picture viewer is not working, so until that’s sorted, I’ll insert the photos below.

It’s been a long day, great racing in the sand, it’s painful, even for me, to watch these bikes being destroyed in the sand. Finally, it rained a little during the U23 race but it didn’t really change the face of the race but after the last two months’ draught, it was definitely a start.

Today, I have learnt a valuable lesson on never giving up. Normally, such learnings come through watching rider doing something inspiring on his or her bike, but not today.

The day started a bit hurriedly as we overslept and we arrived a bit late at Gavere, then we got lost, then it took ages to get to the race venue. It all resulted in me missing the most of the women’s race. I was very annoyed but there wasn’t anything I could have done. I then set out to recce the course while the juniors raced and while it gave me a rough idea of the course, I didn’t find nice angles or interesting spots.

This was the second race this year in this area – the first being Zonhoven just a couple of weeks ago. The morning greeted us in Nieuwpoort with an almost impenetrable fog, but as soon as we left Brussels, it eased up and the sun started to shine – another sunny race, great…