Startlist can be found here
Strange date for this one being mid-week. In years past i've heard this race is a strange format as well with a ferry taking you to an island and then swim back to land to T1. It looks like the race changed in 2010 to a standard 2 lap swim though as the event was bidding for Euros. It won and will be 2013 Europeans.
I'm excited for this swim I must say. Perhaps more stoked than any other race to date. Raoul Shaw (FRA) will make his ITU debut. Who is he? He has led out every French GP I've seen and been known to even put time into Richard Varga. That was over 750m, here he has double that real estate. So no doubt he will lead it out....with perhaps Vasiliev (RUS) if Shaw chooses to have some company to start the bike.
The main group, essentially a Eastern Euro training session, will be about a dozen. Sapunov (UKR) and Malyshev (RUS) should be a fair amount of regular work to bring them up to our 2 leaders before T2.
Onto the run with all major contenders in tact Vasiliev and Martynenko (UKR) are both hot having won races in the past two weeks. Having not finished a race since Kitzbuhel WCS it is hard to gauge what type of fitness Unger (GER) has, but you can never count the '08 World Champ out. Throw in some more solid veterans like Tutukin and Sysoev (RUS), Syutkin (UKR), and Rouault (FRA, unsure of start) and you have a solid run to unfold. Through the first 5k we should see a group of 5 or 6 running together. The eastern bloc rivals will be sure to leave the tanks empty as they battle over the closing lap.
A toss up, but I'll go with Meshcheryakov (RUS) showing us some of the 2010 World Cup winning form followed by Martynenko (UKR) and Malyshev of Russia.
Darkhorse: Tsvetkov (UKR)
No comments:
Post a Comment