Bookwalter beats Zabriskie, puts BMC in Utah lead

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Brent Bookwalter (BMC) won the opening stage of the Tour of Utah that kicked off in Salt Lake City Tuesday. He flew through the final downhill twists and turns to cross the line in 6:12 minutes, two seconds faster than runner-up Dave Zabriskie (DZ Nuts) and three seconds faster than team-mate Ian McKissick.

“This is my first time trial win since I broke my leg in 2007,” said Bookwalter. “It’s been a long time coming and it feels really good. This race, last year, was the first time I felt back to normal again and it’s come full circle. I felt really confident and smooth today.”

Bookwalter’s winning time put BMC in the early race lead at the six-stage event. The squad placed four riders inside the top 10, giving it a healthy number of cards to play over the coming mountainous stages. He admitted that he was not surprised by BMC’s performance, especially after completing a 10-day training camp leading in to Utah.

“There was a lot of talk this week about maybe guys not wanting to win this time trial,” said Bookwalter. “I think this race is proven to be a very hard race to control because it is the most selective course in the USA. No doubt that it’s a huge challenge for any team to control. But starting off is great and great for the team. I feel like I got a monkey off my back winning the time trial.”

Defending champion Jeff Louder placed fifth and Chris Barton took the early lead in the event’s Best Young Rider with his sixth place finish.

Zabriskie, who resides in Salt Lake City, had previewed the 4.5-kilometre prologue course prior to race day and also knows many of the decisive climbs held throughout the stage race. He is without his Garmin-Slipstream team-mates this week and will be racing under the banner of his company name DZ Nuts - a chamois cream.

“I checked out the course yesterday and today just to see how they did the entry and the exit,” said Zabriskie, who will start stage one wearing the Best Utah Rider jeresy. “It was a nice course that ran beside the capital buildings with quite a few fans out. I’m really happy to be here. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go down being a ProTour team and luckily I have this company, similar to Lance having his company, so I wore this attire.”

He admitted that not having team-mates will make a tough stage race even tougher. Although he is in the company of the Felt-Holowesko Partners-Garmin U23 team, the young counterpart to the ProTour team Garmin-Slipstream, he assured that they would not be working together.

“It’s been laid out to me quite explicitly that that’s against the rules,” he said. “But it’s nice for me to see the younger guys and if I can push them in the right direction, but, they’re racing really well.

“There is never an easy race but, if there were any race to not have team-mates this is it because there aren’t any long valleys were a team would do a full chase on the front,” he added. “A lot of it is real mountain top days.”

The race will continue with stage one’s 137 kilometre road race beginning in Ogden and finishing in Salt Lake City. The stage features two significant ascents and nearly 2000 metres of climbing in total.