In the Men's Elite Division 11 clubs fielded teams on a very blustery, cold but luckily not wet day at Burrembeet in the middle of nowwhere, about 20min out of Ballarat.  The teams left at 3 minute intervals with Ballarat, Caulfield-Carnegie, and Brunswick expected to be the powerful teams on the day.  Cycle Sport Victoria had ranked Coburg only 8th fastest team.

Darren Lapthorne was a late scratching to Coburg's team, which unfortunately would be a huge loss to the overall strength of the team, but Adrian Hanson would now take his place only 3 weeks after crashing and breaking his wrist.  The team consisting of Andrew Ward, Paul Logan, Steve Pilson and Adrian looked pretty solid but we all knew with the wind, gusts up to 40 knots coming from the north-west (source: Weatherzone) it would be a tough day out there.

We were the fourth team to leave 3 minutes behind Ararat.  Andrew Ward had assumed a leaders position in our group, giving us instructions now and then on pace, on whether to roll through, or do a turn at the front.  For most of us this was good, as even after 5km into it we were all having trouble just trying to hold the bike in a reasonably straight line in the wind!  The course was basically all head/cross winds for the first 30km and then tail/cross winds for the final 30km.  Just after we had completed 20km we hit a few long uphill drags, which started to put some real pressure on the slightly weaker members of the team and at about 25km, Steve was unable to hold onto the caboose/train and dropped off the pace.  This now meant that the 3 of us would now have to hold together all the way to the finish.

Just before the turn around point we saw the 3 teams in front of us and it was clear we had gained huge amounts of time on them.  This gave us much confidence to keep together and give it our all.  Within the next 5km we had caught a couple of teams and flew by them as hard as we could go rubbing more salt into the wounds.  From there on, with a tail wind at our backs, we were pumped and gave it everything we had to the finish passing one more team only km's from the finish.

At the end, we had an idea that we had done pretty well, with every other team losing 1 rider along the way but it was too difficult to know whether we had done enough to make the podium.  As it turns out, we had done enough to take 2nd.

Results
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1st - Ballarat/Sebastol         1:28.49
2nd - Coburg                        @1:53
3rd - Brunswick                    @2.03
4th- Colac #1                        @2.22
5th - Latrobe City                  @3.02.
6th - Carnegie - Caulfield        @5.56
7th - Geelong MBC                @8.20
8th - Warragul                       @8.53
9th - Hawthorn                     @13.08
10th - Colac #2                     @15.29