Cycling: Tour of Missouri - Vande Velde Wins Stage 3 Time Trial

by optic | September 10, 2008 at 03:19 pm

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The stage 3 time trial of the Tour of Missouri marked the first real classification shake-up after two days left mainly to bunch sprints.

Up until now the race has been dominated by team Columbia and the power of Mark Cavendish who took the final sprints on stages one and two. This adds another two vistories to the 5 he took at the Tour earlier this year.

The Tour of Missouri is one of the three big stage races in the US along with the Tour of California and the Tour of Georgia (which may have seen its last year) and some of the top teams have sent credible squads to the race looking for results while the European Peleton races the Vuelta Espana (Tour of Spain).

Racing just a few hundred miles his team sponsor’s headquarters, Garmin-Chipotle rider Christian Vande Velde won the Tour of Missouri’s difficult stage 3 time trial and is poised to take overall victory when the race finishes in St. Louis on Sunday.

Vande Velde clocked the 18-mile time trial in 39:51, 21 seconds faster than three-time world time trial champion Michael Rogers of Columbia. Canadian national time trial champion Svein Tuft (Symmetrics) capitalized on the form that saw him finish seventh at the Olympic time trial in Beijing to finish third, 33 seconds off Vande Velde’s time.

Last year’s overall champion, Columbia’s George Hincapie, finished fourth, 1:03 off the winning time, with national time trial champion Dave Zabriskie (Garmin-Chiptole) rounding out the top five, 1:10 down.