Got the disturbing news yesterday that the Tour d’Eden, the tour that me and my team-mates have been training for so religiously over the last few months, has been cancelled due to “a last-minute sponsor withdrawal”. More like a last-minute realisation that their organising and planning ability wasn’t up to scratch.

How can one have “a last-minute sponsor withdrawal”? Surely there are contracts in place? With penalties for any withdrawal action?? I don’t believe the sponsorship was in place to start off with, and they’ve just been stringing everybody along while they scrambled to find one. And these people are so-called professional event organisers? They can get the Argus Tour right, why can’t they get this together??

So the money spent on accomodation deposits, the huge investment in training time, training camps, etc – what’s it all been for now? This is very depressing. I don’t even want to think about the Gauteng teams that have bought plane tickets. What a waste!

Rode WP Champs today – lasted 2 laps because of some bad team communication. We had Francois up the road in an early break so we were sitting back letting the other teams do the work. Until we saw Francois coming back to the bunch on his own.

That meant that Marco and I moved up to the front, with a little help from the STE guys. But we did most of the work for at least 10k’s. Which provided Virgin Active with the perfect opportunity to attack when we hit a bit of a rise. Needless to say myself, Marco and Francois were all shelled out the back.

I rode the third lap as a warmdown. Overall though I was pretty happy, since I’d ridden a hard 4 1/2 hour ride in the rain the day before, and the legs weren’t feeling at all bad.