The people are friendly in the El Paso/ Juarez area races. The cliques are less, there is less snobishness, the races are multi-national, and the champs are not prima donnas. The racing is furiously fast however. You ride down a breakaway, or at least a surge every mile until your eyes are about to explode and your breath is way behind getting you the oxygen you really need. As soon as a break is about to be caught, the next one goes off- usually four people at top speed. Going west of El Paso is a highway along the Mexican border, these twice a month races are about 46 miles on a good back road.
The halfway point in this race is usually one of the hardest surges- knowing that, I chased down a breakaway of two riders half a km before the turn around. I was toasted as we made the l80; but in these situations, it is far better to be toasted at the front than the back- where 10 people, out of the original 35+ were left to ride home alone w. the vultures and Pancho Villa on the other side of the road.
I melded into what was left of the pack and rested briefly- but the surges really picked up in intensity all the way home; my rest was short lived.
At about 4 km to go, things were getting untidy- there was one rider up the road by l00 m, people were really going fast, and somebody bumped my back wheel hard. There was no crash- but things are "Il loco vida" a s we could see the 1km marker coming up. I moved up near team-mate Jaimie Gandara, the Mario Cippollini of the South. That was not easy, since everybody was going hard to get to the front. Suddenly the speed was so fast that I lost all peripheral vision, and the sound of sprint tires was deafening- we were at 200m to go. I carefully edged a little to the right to catch a better draft- I was near Jaimie (Mario). Suddenly lots of people on my left "blew up" and went backwards fast. Now I was four cogs higher than our local sprints and spinning like crazy. I hit the line and counted 5 or 6 pople in front of me! I thought to myself, "How can this be?"
At the awards cerimony, several young bulls asked me how I did it. I'll tell you the same thing I told them- it had nothing to do with top in speed or power- I was just in the right place at the right time, and rode it out.
Still and all, it felt good to get a prize at age 56 in a race without age cats.!
Ciao, Mario.