Tommy Nankervis

New Beginning

// June 14th, 2008 // A Day Down Under

Howdy readers!

As you may have noticed, i have been very slack about writing a post. There has been plenty going on, and i will try and fill you in on a little bit.

June 1 saw me transfer to a new team! I am now racing for a North Carolina based team, DLP Racing. I will get all of the colours and links on the web page changed shortly, and give a write up on my new machines! All that will come soon, but for now, i will just get a few photos up and update briefly…

Here are most of my new team mates, on the steps out the front of one of our hosts’ houses for Philly Week. Kevin is on the left with his daughter Maya, and most of us the day before Philly. Huge thanks to the two hosts we had for the week, it was nice to get settled in somewhere instead of hopping around hotels till the big race! We were based literally one kilometre from the start…

Cool looking team kit too!

So Philadelphia is pretty crowded! Check out how all of the houses are just stacked into the streets to fit more people in a small space! Finding a car park was ridiculous, it would take up to twenty minutes at times. It is quite amazing how so many people choose to live in such a confined place!

This is what the back yards of all those houses look like. Not much room for a cricket pitch in these yards!

This is what Philly looks like in the day time, driving in on one of the highways…

… and this is what it looks like in the night, from the top of Kevin’s place! Pretty spectacular hey?! A lot of the buildings have really cool light shows and stuff on them too, so you can just sit and watch for hours. We ate dinner up here nearly every night, so we were very lucky! The weather was great too, and up on top of all the houses we got a nice breeze to help cool us down from the ridiculous humidity!

Here is the fountain in the round-a-bout that we pass sixteen times in the Philly race. I put this up because i am sure that not really any riders in the race got a good look at it, and i took this photo on lap eight…! Not really, its from the day before – I am not as good as Teddy King yet!

Here is one of my team mates, Charlie, catching up on some news from an interesting paper! Check it out, i didn’t even know something like this existed!

So as far as the racing goes, Philly week went ok. I was happy with my form, considering the lack of racing in the lead-up, but luck didn’t really come my way for Philly.

Allentown was a shock to the system, and i got dropped with about 4k to go. Reading went well i thought, i have never made it over the climp in the group before, and this year, i made it over all three times, only to get dropped about 400m from the top of the KOM. I know it wasn’t a good result as such, but for me, it gave me a bunch of confidence for Philly. Philly was a scorcher, unbelievably hot! To cut a long story short, i flatted with 3 laps to go, got back on after a long chase, then started feeling really good, got over the climb no worries each lap, then on the lead in to the wall i was in a crash, and landed ribs first on someones handlebars (i think i broke them?), then chasing back on, somehow crashed again, on my own…! Figure that out, i am still try to too! The second crash sort of meant i was out of contention, and my breathing has been hampered since because of my ribs!

Oh well, off to Nashville this weekend for the Edgar Soto Memorial, so hopefully the good form can transfer into some results!

I will update after the weekend too, with some race reports or something…

In other news, Keally and I have moved to Roswell, Atlanta, with her parents. Keally got some work there, so we are no longer living in Athens, and on Thursday, we picked up a U-Haul truck, packed up everything, and moved! Done!

I will write more during the week!

Laters…

An office desk has 400 times more bacteria than a toilet.