Just a quick spiel from Matty U (aka Rooster) from their awesome experience in Indo last week. Huge congrads for a surviving the tough test. Good work boys 🙂 Big ring needs to spend less time laying down in bike races me thinks hehe
Nico 🙂

Myself and Steve Hedley have just arrived back in Perth after racing the Tour of Jakarta and the Tour of East Java with the Eddy Hollands Bicycle Service Team.

Our team consisted of 5 riders, a team manager and a mechanic.

With teams from all over the world represented we knew that we were in for some hard racing.

We were met at the airport where our driver picked us up in our team car and our bikes were loaded onto a truck, this would be a common way of travel over the next 10 days.

Once we arrived at our motel in Jakarta we soon realized that there would be no pre race training ride’s as the traffic was way to dangerous.

Jakarta was hot, muggy, smoggy and dirty so we knew that we were going to have a tough day come race day.

Our first race was the tour of Jakarta which was a 170km stage race.

This was not a good one for me as I crashed out at the 30km mark after a rider beside me decided to touch wheels with his mate and at 55km/ph I kinda had nowhere to go, so after about 50 meters of sliding on my head I was knocked out and on the deck.

The inside of an ambulance was not how I had imagined my first pro race would end up.

After a few hours I made it back to the hotel to learn that Steve and the rest of the boy’s got through ok, no result but the first race was out of the way.

A quick phone call to Perth to get a new helmet and kit sent over would also help.

Next came the tour of East Java which was 3 stages consisting of a 110km, 155km and a 100km day.

These distances were not too long but they made up for it with the speed, they just never ever slow down.

The roads made the hell of the north race at Joondalup look like a picnic these roads were very narrow, pot holes everywhere, dirt, railway crossings etc

Chuck in 110 riders with 24 team cars, officials thousands of spectators and random things to crash into like parked trucks, flying water bottles, food, animals etc and you know that you could be in for a bad day.

When the gun goes and bang the speed goes straight to 50km/ph, this is where it would stay for the entire tour

It is hard to fully describe what it is like in the peleton as it is nothing like I have ever done before, maybe it is best described as the freeway bike hike on steroids except you are racing it on a narrow bumpy goat track.

At times just trying to stay upright was a battle as these riders like to jump up the inside of you all the time, especially going into corners, they will just ride past you in the gutter and chop your wheel as this is just there style of racing. It took me a bit to get used to that.

Once I understood how the peleton worked I began to enjoy it, you just needed to be on your toes the entire time.

Keeping hydrated was my biggest challenge as it was so hot the water and Gatorade just goes straight through you, typically I would do 6 – 7 bidons each stage and not need a pee at the end.

I won’t go into each and every stage by detail as it would take long but I was happy with just finishing the tour, for the recode I finished 53rd on GC 2min 30 sec down on the leader.

Steve finished a bit further down on time as he wanted the entire experience and managed to crash 3 times, he did end up finishing the tour and when he was upright he was right up there dishing it out to the pro teams.

Matty Upton