By Vinny Owens

While most of the team was up in Sacramento, CA doing the Sacramento Grand Prix on Sunday, Kevin and I went to the Modesto Road Race.  The course is a flat 9 mile loop with a lot of turns and 9 laps for a total of 81 miles.

The plan was to let the race unfold a little bit and give it some time to let guys get a little tired and to get in a break. As the race rolled out it started out surprisingly mellow and the attacks started about half way through the first lap. Kevin and I covered multiple attacks and even did some counter attacks.

The group was really marking Kevin so we tried to use this to our advantage so I started throwing down more attacks to get up the road since they weren’t marking me as bad. On the 3rd lap I got away with another rider, I knew this wouldn’t probably be the winning move with over 50 miles to go, but it would at least take the pressure off of Kevin and allow him to sit in. The gap continued to grow and reached a maximum of 2 minutes. After 3 laps of being off the front we were joined by 2 more riders. We continued to work together and with 3 laps to go the gap steadily continued to grow.

At this point I was thinking that the break was going to stick. The break continued to roll and about half way through the last lap the attacks started. I didn’t want to go to the line with 3 other guys, preferably come across the line solo or just one other rider. After multiple attacks and covering moves, with about 2 miles to go it was down to just 2 of us.

With one kilometer to go I put in an attack and got a gap, not as big as I liked but a gap at that. I continued to go as hard as I could and was able to hold it to the finish line. I later found out that Kevin attacked the group on the last lap and soloed in for 4th place. It was great teamwork for the Yahoo! Cycling Team and great results considering we only had 2 guys there.