Circuit Cycliste Sarthe - Pays de la Loire

A few days after the Junior bike race, we had the pleasure to see some of a 5-day professional race that came through Angers. In the morning, while I was teaching, Philipp and Bernard went to see the peloton’s arrival. Philipp got a picture of my favorite cyclist, Thomas Voekler. It was his first race following surgery on his collar bone.

In the afternoon, we went to see the “contre la montre” ... the individual time trials. I was excited to cheer Thomas on.

The nice thing about this race is that because it’s much smaller than the Tour de France, you can get up close to the cyclists during their warm-up. Philipp and I walked around to the various teams’ busses and watched them prepare for their turns. It would have been cool to see Lance Armstrong, but he’s still injured so he wasn’t there. We missed Thomas’ warm-up, as we walked around after he’d done his time trial. We did see Franck Bouyer, who is also on the Bouygues team, and had been the special guest at Bernard’s bike race.