In such an extreme race, everyone bet on the “specialist”, killer of extreme races, Taddy Blazusiak, but the devil in flesh probably looked up and mixed the cards of this fantastic rollercoaster full of emotions.
During a race that was told to be epical, even the stronger had to fall: Blazusiak, the unbeatable who came from a series of positive winnings in other international races and owner of the past two editions of Hell’s Gate, gave up during the first lap of the hardest afternoon phase, when an hard fall caused damages to his bike that could not be fixed.
Before him, starting from the first laps of the selective phase in the morning, two columns of the Italian range such as Alessandro Botturi and Mario Rinaldi had to give up: the first also due to a fall and the other because “not in the mood”. The next was Paul Bolton, but also a few others gave up during the first four laps in the morning, so many that at the start in the afternoon we could count only forty-six riders on hundred and three that were in the morning.
Actually, the first phase of the race wasn’t supposed to be that hard; or at least that was what Capitan Fasola said! But the rainy weather on Friday probably gave that little spicy to the already tricky net of paths of Ciocco.