Winning at the Giro & Thüringen

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Judith Arndt (T-Mobile Women) celebrates one win of three at the Giro.(Image credit: Nicola Ianuale)

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Lets start with the Giro, where we managed to take three stage wins. One time I crossed the finish line first, and on the pictures and in the result, it looked like I had won the bunch sprint. How cool, since it was always my dream to beat all the good sprinters in a real sprint for a stage win! But I have to admit that both the photos and the result were deceptive. In truth I had attacked with one kilometer to go, went solo, and just made it home before the fast girls caught me. No dream come true, but still a groovy way to win a bike race, I think.

Back to cycling, the first two days of the tour were just normal races, but on the third day it got interesting, when a British rider named Emma Pooley disappeared on her own and soon had over 10 minutes to the bunch. The Raleigh Team which held the race lead at this point refused to do their job and remained quiet. As nobody else felt responsible to send some riders to the front to do some chasing it was Nuernberger and us who started to work with 30km to go to keep the damage as low as possible. Pooley won with about five minutes ahead of the next group.

Then, some of the most excellent teamwork ever started. Once we had decided to try to get back the time via bonus seconds my team-mates had to chase down every single rider who wanted to disappear. So the magenta women did their team time trial in front of the peleton, and I was only sitting in waiting to sprint for those stupid seconds. It was nerve-wracking! Amber did a pretty good job defending herself, too. However, after the second last stage she was only two seconds ahead, which promised an exciting last day for both riders and specators.

Once the last stage had started, the picture looked the same as for the stage before: attack after attack, and T-Mobile time trialing in the front to get them all back. I was wondering why all those ambitous attacking riders didn't simply wait until after the bonus sprints, then we would have been more than happy to let them go. But attacking like this, they didn't succeed. They only made it really hard for my team-mates.

Anyways, it was hard, but we managed so that I could sprint two more seconds out of Neben, which put us both in equal time. Fortunately my numbers behind the comma in the time trial were better than Neben's, thats why (after some confusion caused by the announcer who called Amber Neben as the winner to the spectators), I got the overall win at the end. For me, that was one of the most emotional victories ever! I was so excited that I almost passed out on the podium. Such a close race...the last bonus sprint had even been a photo finish between us! Could a race be more spectacular?

The race started very agressive with attacks from the gun, and it stayed like this until the end. The best attack was launched by Chantal Beltman from our team. It was just perfectly timed, plus with Karin Thuerig she got the perfect companion as well. They both were smart enough to stay together until the last climb from where it was about six kilometers to go. When I heard in the radio that Chantal had dropped Thuerig in the climb and was away solo to take the win, I really had a hard time to stay focused on the race. It was just too cool, I got goosebumps and was smiling the whole last lap. The most funny thing was that Chantal was just back from her trip to South-Korea and Bejing, but obviously sitting in airplanes and sightseeing in Asia can't be that bad!

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