All together now... (Image credit: Christi Valentine-Anderson)
In the end, the Dream Team's apartment at the Cairn's Lakes Resort was littered with trophies, mounted crocodiles and truly niche souvenirs collected by the team over the past 15 days in the Australian Outback.
We won seven stages (five to Bettin and two to Hundertmarck), the point's competition, second overall for Bettin and the team competition (by five hours over the next team). We had four of our five riders in the top ten on General Classification and all finished with relatively minor injuries (mostly sustained at the playground after hours). To put it more succinctly the Dream Team rocked! We played hard and we rode like a professional team; as a result, we cleaned up at the awards ceremony. Kai Hundertmarck was awarded the James Grant Memorial shield as he was clearly the most flamboyant rider on tour. I look to seeing the one-hour TV show of this year's Crocodile Trophy; it should look like "the Kai Show", with one impressive clip of the awesome tumble by Jens Zemke, which the TV crew was there to shoot.
Here is just a quick recap of our last three stage victories. First, Cooktown went to Hundertmarck who jumped away early in the stage and soloed to victory. Hansen was so busy worrying about Bettin and conserving enough energy for the queen stage over the CREB track the next day, that he made no attempt to catch the German Ironman. This played well into Kai's hands as he only had ten minutes up his sleeve when he hit the bitumen and the gnarly head wind kicked into gear.
