Tour Durban MTB

Tour Durban weekend...
Well last night i decided to go and support the guys racing the Crit race around the Gateway Boulevard. It was a really good event and well supported. The racing was fast and was great to watch the guys do their thing!

Today was the Tour Durban MTB race and i decided to give it a go and shake up the legs before tomorrows 125km road event.
The race started and finished on the Gateway Boulevard and took us out into the cane fields around the Umhlanga area. A great new course was built for this years event and the guys really did a good job providing us with a good race route.Unfortunately the marshals on the route extremely poor and caused havoc out on the course.
We set off from the start, winding through some of the surronding streets of Gateway before heading into some nice newly cut single track, through a school grounds and off into the cane fields. The racing was super fast with a lot of fast district roads in the first half of the race, but eventually when we hit the first climbs the attacks went and a group of 4 riders went free. They were Rouke Crouser, Brendan Davids, Ty White and Andrew Hill...I found myself in a group of 4 riders chasing down the leaders, the 4 of us rode hard to limit the loss to the front bunch.
Over the last 3km of the race i rode a hard tempo to try to break my group of 4 down by the time we hit the line. It came down to a sprint between myself and one of the ASG road riders and unfortunately he managed to get half a wheel in front of mine. But this is where we realised the problem, the front 4 riders that we had been chasing down were not even at the finish... They had taken a wrong turn out on the course, finally getting a lift back to the course and then making their way to the finish!
There was obviously now a lot of confusion at the finish and the decision was finally made to award those 4 with the first 4 places...in my eyes not the fairest decision I've ever seen made and certainly not following any sort of rules, never mind UCI rules...but hey, guess that's how life goes!

In the end i was awarded 1st Sub Vet in a time of 1h32min and i think 6th over all, not even sure about this as i don't think anyone really knew what was going on.

Tomorrow is the Tour Durban road race and I'm racing for the Marty's Cycles Top Club, in the Cat 1 race. It should be a good race and hopefully i have the legs to hang in to the end. At least there shouldn't be any riders taking a wrong turn out there.