CYCLING

Daily Diary: Joe Cooper talks Tour de Korea – Stage 5

By Aaron S Lee

Kiwi Patrick Bevin claims another second-place finish behind race leader Caleb Ewan after a challenging stage 5, and national road race champion Joe Cooper shares the details with NZ Bike.

GANGJIN, South Korea—The 15th Tour de Korea has seemingly come down to a two-team race, with Australian WorldTour team, Orica-GreenEdge, trading blows with New Zealand Continental squad, Avanti Racing Team.


Tour de Korea Stage 5

A day after Avanti’s Patrick Bevin (NZL) interrupted Orica’s Caleb Ewan’s (AUS) two-stage win streak, Ewan was back on top just clipping Bevin in the stage 5 final on Thursday to take his third stage win in four days and extend his general classification lead over the 24-year-old North Island native to eight seconds with three stages remaining.


Frasier Gough Stage 5 Tour de Korea


Gough & van der Loeg Stage 5 Tour de Korea

NZ Bike caught up with reigning New Zealand road race champion and the 2014 Australian National Road Series winner Joe Cooper to talk about his Avanti teammates’ success and how much he enjoys his role in helping Bevin record another result on the year.


Mitchell Lovelock-Fay Stage 5 Tour de Korea


Patrick Bevin Stage 5 Tour de Korea

Joe Cooper’s diary entry: Stage 5 – Yeosu - Gangjin, 175km
Today was good day. The first 10km were pretty helter skelter stuff.

We were in a position that we couldn’t allow Orica-GreenEdge to go up the road and vice versa because there would be no one then to actually do the grunt work in controlling the race.

We had I 50km worth of battling back and forth, which is good as it gets the race going, and then you only have 100km to think about what to do at the finish.


Avanti pre-stage 5

The Iranian teams – Pishgaman-Giant and Tabriz Petrochemical – were true to how they ride and they definitely lit up that king of the mountain climb inside the last 5km. That was probably one of the hardest parts of the stage, and it was single file all the way up – I think the line was probably 100m long from front to back.

On Wednesday night, we talked about trying to storm up the climb and do our best to drop race leader Caleb Ewan (Orica-GreenEdge), but the climb was not steep enough and you’d need a motorbike to do any sort of damage to the young Aussie.

Overall, it didn’t change anything, as Ewan was too strong.

My teammates Neil van der Ploeg (AUS), Anthony Giacoppo (AUS) and Patrick Bevin are coming in to some good teamwork skills and it almost paid off again today with another victory. There are a couple of really hard stages coming up and we have four guys in – and around – the GC and tomorrow could be game on!

In the meantime, stay tuned...
-Joe Cooper





Tomorrow’s entry: Stage6 – Gangjin - Gunsan, 193.7km
Stage 2 results (top 5)
1.    Caleb Ewan (Orica-GreenEdge)                                             4:08:56
2.    Patrick Bevin (Avanti Racing Team)                                            -
3.    Andrea Peron (Team Novo Nordisk)                                           -
4.    Kohei Uchima (Bridgestone Anchor Cycling Team)                     -
5.    Cheung Gyo Jeong                                                                  +0:02

General classification (top 5)
1.    Caleb Ewan (Orica-GreenEdge)                                             20:43:06
2.    Patrick Bevin (Avanti Racing Team)                                       +00.08
3.    Adam Blythe (Orica-GreenEdge)                                           +00.34
4.    Anthony Giacoppo (Avanti Racing Team)                              +00.38
5.    Ha Jeon Jung (Seoul Cycling Team)                                          -

Aaron S. Lee is a cycling and triathlon columnist for Eurosport and a guest contributor to NZ Bike Magazine.  Image credit Daebong Kim.