De 8ste Grote Prijs Roger De Coninck voor junioren in Berg-Kampenhout werd zondag gewonnen door de Brit Lucas Jowett. De tweedejaarsjunior van het Flanderscolor - Galloo Team had een voorsprong van 15 seconden op de nummer 2, Maurits Van Petegem.
"As the race started neutralization was pretty chaos like usual , I started a few rows back from the front and managed to move my way up to the front by the start of the race. Soon as the race was denaturalized attacks were flying from all angles with many teams trying to get away. Our plan as a team was to get ideally me in the break as then the lads didn’t have to chase in the peloton and could just sit in if I was up the road. Attacks kept on happening , until eventually one las got away he was around 200m up the road for a good 4 or 5 minutes , so then I decided this was the move to make I attacked and no one followed I bridged pretty quickly across to him and just carried on riding to give him a break and I knew that I had to ride full gas for a bit to get a gap. Once we established a gap we were both sharing turns well. At about 15/16k 2 riders from the same team bridged across which made a group of 4. I knew it was a good thing that we had a group of 4 as we still had over 100k to go. We all kept pulling turns well and it was a really smooth group of 4 all the way round. At around 50k to go a large group bridged across from the main peloton with about 20 more riders in so when they got across we had a large group of about 24 riders. I was confident then with a group that big it was staying away. For the first few laps with the big group it was pretty smooth with people all pulling a turn. There was quite a few missing a Turn aswell though. With about 2 laps to go people started attacking so that’s when I begun , I just kept attacking and attacking , and making it hard in the wind especially the little crosswind section after the finish line , one time we managed to force a small split but it all came back together. I had a team mate in the group who I knew would have a very good chance in the sprint If it came down to it so I knew that I could just keep attacking as if I didn’t get away I could then lead him out. With about 13k to go me and two other forged a small gap Probaly about 10 seconds on the peloton it was me and two teammates from another team but we immediately got brought back . I started to tell on the last lap the distance was getting to people and people were starting to feel tired and they weren’t jumping on my attacks as quick. One lad did a strong attack into a windy section and people had to go hard to latch on to his wheel , I looked around and realized people were struggling an as I felt ok I just launched the attack with about 8k to go and no one could follow. I made sure that I got the gap before I started to pace myself. I went deep the first few minutes to gain the gap then once the gap was made I knew that if I could ride at around 50kmh they couldn’t catch me because they didn’t have the power left in the group. With about 2k to go the gap was 30 seconds and I was pretty confident then I could solo to the finish.": vertelt Lucas.
1 JOWETT LUCAS - FLANDERS COLOR - GALLOO TEAM
2 VAN PETEGEM MAURITS - WIELERCLUB ONDER ONS - PARIKE VZW
3 SMETS JOCHEN - VAN MOSSEL HEIST CYCLING TEAM