A few years ago someone took the initiative to create a week of Championships for smaller sports. They got TV interested and this has grown and become something really good for us. We have always had a Criterium Championship and since last year we have it in this “Swedish Champ week”. This meant that TV sent the race live and that, for you who are not from Sweden, is a big thing for cycling that hardly get mentioned on the sports news on TV.
This was a great week for the organisers in Halmstad, nice races and really nice weather! We came here on Wednesday and stayed with my friends Åsa and Joakim. We got to see Åsa get the gold and Joakim the silver in Biathle (run-swim-run) on Thursday and Åsa getting another gold in Triathlon on Saturday, very impressive!!! So I was inspired for my race on Sunday.
We had 8 girls from the team on the start line and our goal was to take the first 5 spots. It was a hard and fun race with lots of attacks from the start! We got away one and one but nothing really serious until we were 4 girls that got away on the 7th out of 15 laps. It was me, Monica and Malin from us and Sara from another team. We got rid of Sara and the 3 of us could just work together and open the gap to the bunch. We raced about it on the last gap and after Malin did an early attack me and Monica sat on her wheel and waited for the sprint. We both passed Malin 100 meters from the finish and it was a tight sprint where they had to use the photo finish to decide that Monica had won about 10 cm ahead of me.
It was a good day for the team, we got 1,2,3,5 and 6th and lots of TV coverage.
See the last lap and the sprint here
Just getting out of the saddle to attack
Only Monica, Malin and me left
About 100 meters to go
The podium