We went to watch last night’s North Shore City Grand Prix, which took over downtown Takapuna (such as it is) for the night. Criteriums are fantastic to watch, as you can stand in one spot, eating a lovely Pizza, for example, and watch the riders come past you again and again.
Standing roughly a metre away from a group of 20-30 Cyclists head down in a big gear at 50ish KPH downhill, as close to the other riders as you are to your computer now makes you think of how brave you have to be to ride this kind of race – it’s not for wussy sports bloggers like myself.
We caught the Open Men’s race, featuring the legendary Olympian and PRO Graeme Miller, who bagged second place behind a rider whose name I don’t know, who made an early break and held on in an extremely gutsy ride in blustery conditions.
After watching the Elite Women race, we strolled down to see the Elite Men line up for their race. I kept an eye on Gordon McCauley, the ‘people’s champion’ as the MC called him about 37 times. He has a reputation for being an extremely hard rider, and sledger, we caught a little glimpse as he sharked up to the start / finish, muttering something to a young rider, breaking him out of his pre-race trance. McCauley set a hard and fast tempo in the little of the race we saw, bringing the peloton extremely close to the barriers early on – McCauley finished up third – turns out he’s on Twitter too.
