Irish cycling star Nicholas Roche shines at the stage 3 of Tour of Beijing 2011
Nicholas Roche showed a brilliant performance at the Tour of Beijing 2011 as he won the stage 3 of the race. He finished the 162 kilometre stage in a total time of 3:53:15 and won by a fraction over Philip Deignan. Christopher Froome finished the race at
third position with only one second behind the race leader.
Roche had a tough season and managed to score only 13 points for his team as he is at the 132nd position at the UCI World Tour individual rankings. This is his first win ever at the World Tour level. Roche was overwhelmed by his performance as
he said, “It’s all I’ve been waiting for two years now.” He further added that he had some near misses recently and a big win is all he needed to get his energies back. He was quoted as saying, “Last year I had great results and great satisfaction, but the
one thing that was missing was a win. This year I had little satisfaction and I finally get a win, so it balances out over the two years.”
The 27 year old’s stage win really helped his team as Ag2R la Mondiale is in need of UCI points to secure its license for the coming season. Team Ag2R has only secured 342 points throughout this season and is the last team on the UCI team’s rankings as of
September 2011. Nicholas was amongst the three riders who were leading the stage in the final 15 kilometres. The other riders in the group were Christopher Froome of team Sky and Philip Deignan of team RadioShack.
After the race Roche stated that the last few kilometres passed in no time and Froome was looking really good towards the end. However, he managed to secure the first spot in a close finish and earned 15 UCI points for his team. After the end of stage 3
general classifications Nicholas is at 11th position with 48 seconds behind the race leader Tony Martin of HTC-Highroad. He has overall earned 17 UCI points so far at the Tour of Beijing 2011.
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