Stage One Jitters

Today's opening stage was a typical flat landing nervous stress fest. I had remarkable flashbacks to my days of Tour of Belgium. The stage today was 175km of small rolling hills on decent size roads, but some small, twisty roads with little stones all over them causing lots of flats. The stage was dry until about 25km, but the rain actually made me feel more at peace because it seemed to make things a little less nervous. The whole day was stressful. I spent the majority of the day at the back of the field just relaxing and saving energy as best I could.

Tomorrow is something similar to today I think. Hopefully their prediction of rain does not come true and it can be an uneventful stage. Today in the finishing circuit we had the unfortunate luck of Taylor taking a slide across the wet pavement. He was maybe top 10 into the last corner and had a great chance at the sprint, but got mixed up with another guy trying to squeeze in where he shouldn't have been and it caused a number of guys to go down. Taylor seems to be fine though and still in good spirits, so hopefully he is good to go tomorrow again. Cheers!