Free Web NovelChapter 129: Chapter 104: The Last 3 Most Important Races of the Year
’Otherwise, with my mother-in—er, Aunt Zhang, making so many dishes for me, it would be far too naive of me to just show up and freeload like some ignorant child.’
’Wouldn’t the personal image I’ve worked so hard to build with my results just plummet?’
After a satisfying meal, Huang Chong once again thanked Zhang Wanqing and Chen Mingyuan for their warm hospitality before leaving with Chen Junyi to meet up with the team.
After he got in the car, Chen Junyi let out a long sigh of relief and said:
"See? I wasn’t lying, was I? I told you my parents would be happy to have you over for dinner. You really didn’t have to go to the trouble of buying fruit!"
Hearing this, Huang Chong couldn’t help but give her a deep look.
’This girl was certainly a powerhouse when it came to her professional abilities. It seemed like she could master any difficult task as soon as she learned it, understanding things in a flash.’
’But when it came to social etiquette, she was clearly a bit of a novice.’
’So young, after all!’
’How could she know that his bag of fruit had actually already accomplished a great feat?’
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After meeting up with the team, Huang Chong, Peng Yuantang, and a few of the foreign cyclists dove straight into training.
They had to wait for Brother Xiaoma, Hou Dongyi, and the others to finish the National Championships and return to Hangcheng before they could all head to Wenzhou together.
The upcoming Wenzhou Leqing Station was the only stop in the entire professional league with two race days.
Day one was a 128km city criterium.
The route circled the central urban area of Leqing, passing through East Canal Park, Victory River Park, and Qinghe Park, requiring a total of 16 laps.
Huang Chong glanced at the elevation profile. It was pancake-flat, a perfect stage for sprinters.
That meant all he had to do was stay with the peloton and cross the finish line safely.
Day two was a 160km road race.
The race started at Yandang Mountain in Leqing and finished in Daruoyan Town, Yongjia.
The route traversed National Highway 104, Yannan Road, Provincial Road 223, and South Reopened Provincial Road 41, among others, with many difficult climbs along the way.
All in all, if he wanted to defend his overall leader’s Red Jersey, he would definitely have to make a move in the road race.
And things went exactly as he had predicted. When the Wenzhou Leqing Station officially began on July 2nd, the city criterium came down to a final sprint.
For GC Cyclists like him, the entire race was just about showing up.
As long as they weren’t dropped by the sprint group and could cross the finish line right behind the sprinters, they wouldn’t lose any time and would be credited with the same finishing time.
Therefore, Huang Chong’s position in the general classification remained unchanged. He still held the first-place Red Jersey, maintaining his lead of over two minutes on the second-place rider, Niu Yikui, who was back in his Li Ning Star kit.
As for the city criterium, the winner was no surprise either. It was claimed by the same person who won the previous Puyang Station: the Li Ning Star team’s foreign rider, SHNYRKO Aliaksei.
However, the second and third-place finishers were completely different from the last station.
Second place went to Brother Xiaoma, and third place was taken by a cyclist from the BDR-Blueprint Continental Team named Wang Kueicheng.
With the professional league past its halfway point, the situation was undoubtedly clear: the battle for the overall title was essentially between the Hengxiang Team and the Li Ning Star Team.
Facing the strong performance of Li Ning Star’s Belarusian rider SHNYRKO Aliaksei in the last two stations, Coach Li gave Huang Chong a specific tactical briefing before the road race.
He knew full well that if Huang Chong’s lead was overturned, the Hengxiang Team’s fight for the general classification would be all but over.
On July 3rd, at nine in the morning, the road race officially began.
As the coach of a team with a rider like Huang Chong, and having witnessed his dominant performance at the Asian Championships, Coach Li no longer needed to devise complicated tactics like before.
’This kid went head-to-head with the attacks of World Tour Cyclists. Is there any way he’d lose on a hilly stage to that Li Ning Star rider from Belarus, who’s fundamentally a sprinter?’
’Impossible.’
So, his tactic for the day was simple: the entire team would ride for Huang Chong.
Five domestiques would protect him for the entire race, responsible for delivering him to the front of the hardest climb on the course.
From there, Huang Chong would rely on his own strength to launch an attack on the climb and drop all his rivals!
Huang Chong was truly speechless at such a simple and brutal tactic.
’Damn it, they were treating him like he was Pogačar.’
’Coach Li had a little too much faith in his individual ability.’
But in the end, as the race entered its final stretch and a long, 6km climb with an average gradient of 5% appeared, Peng Yuantang, the last man by Huang Chong’s side, followed Coach Li’s tactical orders. He decisively led his captain, Huang Chong, into an attack on the climb.
Seeing this, Li Ning Star’s Niu Yikui and SHNYRKO Aliaksei immediately responded, getting out of their saddles to follow.
These four were the current top four riders in the general classification.
With this attack, the final showdown had effectively arrived ahead of schedule.
However, while the two Li Ning Star riders could easily follow Peng Yuantang’s attack, once Peng Yuantang blew up and pulled aside to give Huang Chong the line, Huang Chong rose from his saddle again. He launched an anaerobic attack, pushing nearly 700 watts for a full minute on the long climb. In the end, neither Niu Yikui nor SHNYRKO Aliaksei could do anything but watch as he completely opened a gap and rode away solo.
For Niu Yikui, who was second in the GC, this result was somewhat acceptable.
At the Asian Championships, he had finished somewhere in the sixties, while Huang Chong had taken second place. The true gap in their abilities was already immense, so there was nothing more to be said.
Besides, after returning from Thailand, his goal had shifted from contending for the championship to simply holding on to second place overall.
As for SHNYRKO Aliaksei, being dropped on a climb by a Chinese cyclist definitely left a sour taste in his mouth.
But reality was cruel. No matter how indignant he felt, if his legs couldn’t keep up, he had no choice but to accept defeat.
After breaking away on the hardest climb of the entire course, Huang Chong thought for a moment and decided not to even bother conserving his strength.
Everyone already knew what he was capable of after the Asian Championships, so he started putting out maximum effort, riding solo for 36km all the way to the finish.
In the end, he successfully finished the stage with a massive lead of 5 minutes and 13 seconds over the second-place finisher, SHNYRKO Aliaksei.
Niu Yikui, who crossed the line in third, finished at virtually the same time as his teammate.
But in the general classification, adding this to the previous gap of over two minutes, he was now nearly 8 minutes behind Huang Chong after the Wenzhou Station.
With such a huge time difference, as long as Huang Chong didn’t withdraw from the race, a comeback was impossible for him.
Watching Huang Chong choose to kill all suspense in the general classification at this station, Coach Li, beyond marveling at his immense strength, could also roughly guess what was on the rider’s mind.
Huang Chong clearly wanted to shift his focus to the upcoming UCI Tour of Qinghai.
Because among the 15 domestic Intercontinental Teams, including all the foreign riders, he truly had no rivals left.
To continue improving, he had to move on to more difficult Pro Level races and go head-to-head with the Pro Level cyclists coming from Europe itself.
If he could still achieve excellent results in Pro Level races, then a spot on the European circuit would truly be within his grasp.
You could say that the upcoming Tour of Qinghai, the revived Tour of Guangxi World Tour in October, and the Asian Games would be Huang Chong’s only remaining, and most important, three competitions of the year.
But the difficulty of these three events was entirely predictable.
First, the Tour of Qinghai and the Tour of Guangxi were both multi-day stage races, and the competition would be extremely strong.
Whether Huang Chong could withstand the consecutive days of high-intensity racing and even finish successfully was a major question mark.
Second, for the Asian Games, after Kazakhstan lost an Olympic qualification spot at the Asian Championships, they were guaranteed not to hold anything back.
Therefore, their country’s strongest—and Asia’s strongest—World Tour Cyclist, Lutsenko, would certainly be participating.
Whether Huang Chong could once again withstand the combined assault from the Kazakh World Tour Cyclists and make it to the podium at the Asian Games was also a huge question mark.
But regardless, his rivals were no longer domestic riders—they were the cyclists of Europe.
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