Oakey Kermis

Last weekend was the first open road race of the year for the team, which was the Oakey Kermis. Oakey is a small town 2 hours west of Brisbane and has been running the Oakey Kermis for many years. This race is traditionally the season opening road race and always proves to be a hard race. The course has a small 600m long climb in it that averages about 5-6%, so after doing this climb 10 times, it tends to get harder and harder each time, especially when riding over it at close to 40 kph. The back side of the course is always exposed to the wind, with cross winds pushing people into the gutter and breaking the field up. The race is 10 laps of a 6.7km course, so the 67km covered doesn’t seem like much, but is very intense.

The team was super motivated for a good result and we knew that it would be on from the gun. As the race headed out of town for the first time, Ruben Donati attacked hard up the climb, and caused a group of 8 riders to break away early. Our man Callum O’Sullivan was strong enough to work his way into this quality group and settled in for a long day in the saddle.

The rest of the team covered all attempts to bridge across to the break and made sure that we were ready should the break come back.

Roughly half way into the race Callum and several other riders in the break were unable to stay with the front group, and as such, the team had to chase and/or try and bridge across to the front group.

Matt Murray spent a large proportion of the race at the front trying to reduce the gap and set up Sam Volkers for the finale. Unfortunately the break was over 2 minutes up the road and was therefore too far ahead for the chase to make much of an impact. It became clear with about 3 laps to go, that the break will have its day and the rest of us in the group were racing for 5th.

Given the teams hard chase, there was little energy left for us to go for 5th, which wasn’t paying any money anyway, so we did what we could to be at the front and roll in with the group.

Fly V Australia professional rider and state Time Trial Champion, Darren Rolfe, won the race easily with an impressive solo victory.

All in all, it was a good day for the team as we learnt a few lessons about how a race unfolds and realise how a race can sometimes be decided from the first break of the day, which is highly unusual.