Sea Otter 2008 Races

This was Dotsie on the podium after winning the road race. It was on dead chip and seal road with some punchy climbs and descents and she toughed it out until the end, after an acceleration by Tiffany up the final 2.4 mile climb back to the Laguna Seca circuit, Dotsie launched an attack and stayed off to get the win.




The next day was the Laguna Seca circuit race. There were Queen of the Mountain sprints as well as Sprinter points sprints throughout the race in addition to going for the race win. We weren't concerned with any of those except to be aware of when they were coming to watch for accelerations and possible gaps forming in the bunch. After a few breaks forming and then getting re-absorbed because the combination wasn't right, a group finally got a gap that contained a member from almost every team racing. This made for a bit of a pause in the main field as the gap grew and teams were sizing up their representatives in the break versus the other teams'. We were happy with our representation as we had Dotsie and Tiffany in there and they were climbing very well.

Our only concern was that Cheerwine had managed to get 3 in there and one of them was Laura Van Gilder who would be tough to outsprint if she made it to the end. Fortunately, she was struggling a bit on the climb so our director got Tiffany to go harder over the climb and that succeeded in having Laura and a few others drop off. The breakaway group of 10 riders were now in 2 groups of 5. Then Tiffany later accelerated away from her group while Dotsie stayed in watching for a reaction from the others - NONE! Tiffany continued to build her lead and we got word that we could now chase the faltering third group of that breakaway....which meant that we already had the win locked up with Tiff, Dotsie was in the next group of 4 and if we caught the next group after that we had a shot to set Tina up for sprinting for 7th place.....so Iona drilled it on the front for 2 laps and caught the group on the last lap, then Nikki and Tina finished off the job by Tina taking the field sprint and Nikki a few spots behind her.


Happy team riders and staff