RAAM: Race nears close as Robic wins individual crown again

This year’s Race Across America, covering 3,005 miles from Oceanside on the Pacific coast to Annapolis, Maryland, is all but over, with Slovenia’s Jure Robic wrapping up his fifth individual win in the event, and only one of the five British entries in the various team categories still to arrive on the Eastern Seaboard – and they’re chasing an American team hard as they try to finish second in their category.

Robic, shown arriving in Annapolis in the video below, finished in 9 days, 1 hour 1 minute, almost half a day ahead of second placed Gerhard Gulewicz of Austria with Australian Matthew Warner-Smith third.

The eight-man team led by Olympic legend Sir Steve Redgrave arrived in Annapolis just after 9pm last night, crossing the continent in 7 hours, 3 days, 42 minutes to finish eighth out of the 12 teams competing in that division.

Their performance, though, was bettered by the only other British team in the eight-man category – indeed, the only team from outside the US – the Convicts of the Road, whose name gives a nod to the early days of the Tour de France, who arrived third in Annapolis in 6:6:44.

That time, however, impressive as it was, was eclipsed by the two teams ahead of them, with Team Type I clocking a shade below 23mph from coast to coast – a pretty astonishing speed, given the distance involved – to get home in 5:10:48.

Two UK teams were also competing in the four-man male category, Team Sharp4Prostate and Team RAF Survitec Epic, who finished fifth and seventh, respectively, in the category, clocking times of 6:15:7 and 6:23:5.

The category had an international flavour, with four US teams joined by two from Germany plus one apiece from Brazil, Australia and Spain, but it was the home riders that dominated, with three US squads filling the podium places, headed by Bandwidth.com Inc who completed the trip in 6:3:9.

The last British team still out in the road is the Velocity Bikes Team, one of three competing in the two-man category which has already been won by the Biking Vikings from Denmark, who hit the coast in Annapolis yesterday afternoon having ridden the 3,005 miles in 6:23:28.

According to the official RAAM website, which has full details of all categories including video reports, Velocity Bikes are one time station behind the US Team Summit, who are in second place having completed 46 of the 55 legs of the journey, but it looks like it is going to be a close-run thing – if our calculations are right, the British pair were just under an hour and a half behind the Americans at Time Station 55 in Ellenboro, West Virginia, but according to the time splits, they’ve been riding at a higher average speed over most of the recent legs.