Tour of Flanders Sportive

Posted February 14th, 2008 by Andy Jones

Road Race

Start: 04/04/2008 - 08:00

End: 06/04/2008 - 21:00

TeamMK are taking a coach to the Tour of Flanders Sportive on April 4th - 6th.

As of 13^th February, paid up participants now total 47 so we have 5 spare places which I intend holding back for late entries until end of February but then it will be out to the big wide world with the last few places.

The latest updates are:

The departure location on Friday 4^th will be the offices of Frontier estates at Caldecotte Park, Tilbrook, Milton Keynes. Arrival no later than 8 a.m. for 8.30 a.m. departure AT THE LATEST. It is important for us to hit the Tunnel booking time as it’s very busy and the first part of the M25 is usually a car-park most mornings so DO NOT BE LATE. Courtesy of Steve Rice of Frontier secure car parking is available.
Bikes MUST be bagged or hard boxed.
Nearly all participants are doing the middle or shorter courses which start from Ninove, to aid logistics we have therefore moved the first night’s hotel to the Ibis Aalst which is also the second night’s hotel. We will be dropping off the longer course 256k participants (approximately 6 in number) at the central Brugge Ibis with their bikes. This means we won’t have to worry about getting them back to the Long Distance start. IMPORTANT - could all those participants that are doing the Long Distance reconfirm this to both Nirvana and me soonest – we need to be sure of the number of hotel rooms we need to keep in Brugge.
I am sure that all of you would have picked up the Sportive website which is very informative but also check out the main event website which has an excellent breakdown of the full course including a hill profile, the cobbled sections and a detailed route map.
We need to decide on the Après event festivities on Saturday night and an itinerary for picking up the main event on Sunday including some of the women’s race (Nicole Cook etc) which runs first. For Saturday night it might be fun to head off in the coach for Brugge to take in the pre-event festivities or we can drop off in the city of Ghent which has a great pedestrianised City Centre or stay locally in Aalst.
We have an early evening Tunnel return on Sunday 6th so there is a full day available to us, the suggested location for the coach on race day is to base in Oudenaard picking up the Oude Kwaremont climb but we need to pick the brains of those that have done it previously to plan a successful day bearing in mind that it will be very busy wherever we try to view the racing. This months Cycle Sport also has a great article on the event.
Arrival time back in Milton Keynes estimated approx 9 p.m. on Sunday 6^th April.
Don’t forget to make sure your entry is in to the Sportive organisers.
Pass the word around please to those friends that are participating but are not contactable via e-mail
To confirm that you are on the list then check the list of participants