Sweet As.

Sweet As clean up at the Metropolitan Criterium Championships held at Murrarie on Saturday 29^th May.

With the weather forecast not looking good for racing, Dave sent around a team message reassuring us that racing was on and to be prepared to dominate!

Warming up on rollers under our team tent to escape the drizzle Ange, Brielle, Nikolina and I (Sal) were ready to fire on all cylinders. Just when we thought it was going to stay clear, the heavens opened up at the start line and the reality of being drenched from head to toe and covered in sand and grit set in.

With only a small field of seven girls, four of which were Sweet As we felt pretty confident even in the wet conditions of securing at least a couple of us on the podium.

The race got underway with Brielle leading the charge and setting a solid pace right from the beginning. After the first lap Sweet As and Carissa Smith (QSM) broke away followed by another attack by Nikolina who had Brielle and I on her wheel close behind. Ange and Carissa dropped back for a couple of laps with Ange just sitting on her wheel to protect us for the podium.

After a solid attempt to bridge the gap by Carissa she wasn’t able to rejoin us but managed to get Ange close enough to come across and slot into our team time trialling effort for the remainder of the race.

Working together to stay away we established a good rhythm and each lap were receiving feedback and instructions from our race technician TP who encouraged us to keep an even tempo.

We new that it was going to come down to the final two laps to sort out who was going to take the top three spots, it was just a matter of who was going to make the first move.

Anticipation was building, our hearts were pumping and into the final lap I can probably safely say we were all telling our legs to ‘shut up’!

With half a lap to go I decided to make a break. Nikolina tried to go with me but was unsuccessful finding herself battling to stay on the course in the wet conditions and I managed to stay away for my first ever win.

Followed closely behind, Brielle outsprinted Ange to take second with Nikolina in fourth place.

Overall it was a clean sweep for Sweet As and smiles all around. We couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome with Sweet As filling the top four spots at the Metropolitan Championships.