I'm sorry about the image quality. Need to toy around with cropping, auto settings, etc.
This year's Tour de San Luis is team-wise not very well-contested with just 9 teams showing up in Argentina. However, rider-wise, there are several notable riders such as Ivan Basso, Vladimir Efimkin, Walter Pedraza, Nuno Ribeiro and several other strong riders.
Profile-wise, there 1 prologue, 1 19 km time trial, 2 flat stages, 1 stage with a small hill top finish and 1 stage with ends on a mountain top. So, there's something for everyone in this race.
And for this 1st stage, a short 5 km prologue, Sebastian Lang (Sony - Ericsson) is the favourite along with Donald (BMC) and another Sony - Ericsson rider, Johansson. However, there's no doubt that Ivan Basso is top-motivated to do a good prologue in order to get an advantage later on.
And I'm glad to announce that Tiaan Kannemeyer (Ernst & Young) is the first rider on this prologue. More importantly, though, he's also the first rider in PCM09 (yep, that's the surprise). A quick decision made us change to PCM09 where the gameplay is remarkly better, especially when it comes to sprints.
As Tom Zirbel, one of the pre-race favourites, was one of the first riders to start, he took a comfortable lead with 9 seconds down to race favourite Parra Bustamente and 26 seconds to Kannemeyer.
A while later, German champion and big favourite for today's win, Sebastian Lang, managed to beat Zirbel's time with 8 seconds. Impressive performance by the German champion.
Taaramaë was the next rider to stand a chance against Lang's time, but he failed by 11 seconds and had to stay content with a immediate third place. Following him, Walter Pedraza did very well by only losing 16 seconds to Lang, taking fourth. Very good performance, considering the fact that not even the Irish time trial champion, O'Loughlin, managed to beat his time later in the race.
Instead, we had to wait for Steven Cozza to beat his time, which he did by two seconds - still 14 seconds after Lang, though.
Another pre-race favourite was Sony - Ericsson's Johansson - and he did live up to his status. He managed to beat Zirbel by one second and take 2nd, 7 seconds slower than Lang. It did certainly seem difficult to find anyone who'd be able to beat the German champ.
One, who looked good on the route, was Jason Donald, BMC. He also did quite well, but it still wasn't enough. He came in 4 seconds slower than Lang.
Ivan Basso did what he could by ending 7th, 12 seconds after Lang. No one came closer than Donald, though, and therefore, Sony-Ericsson and Sebastian Lang takes the victory. In fact, Sony-Ericsson took it all by also winning both the Team Classification and the Young Rider's Jersey.
