Tamási, National Road Race Championships. The distance was 85.2 km. I had already gotten quite comfortable with my new bike and was really looking forward to this next championship. My goal, once again, was to be faster than those who had finished ahead of me in the previous race. I really wanted to make it onto the podium.
Training went well. My coach, Szilárd, and I rode the course several times in the week leading up to the race. Knowing it would be an all-out grind, with a brutal sprint finish at the end, we practiced the uphill sprint about six times, pushing harder watts each time.
This race is so flat that everyone thinks about breaking away, but it rarely works. It was still a disadvantage not having teammates my age at BTS to work with, but I made sure to stay near the front of the bunch, not taking free pulls, and keeping up with the surges.
These shots really show how close the bunch stayed together. We rode like this throughout.
By the end of the final lap, everyone was gearing up for the finish. There’s a pretty tricky corner right before the final sprint, and the U19 girls had a crash right next to us. Luckily, we made it through unscathed. Four of us nailed the sprint: Péter-Lichtenberger Ábris and Erdős Dani from MBH, who worked brilliantly together throughout the race, Zsembery Boldizsár, and myself.
The following pictures show the finish, and I’ll give you the details after.
So, I finished 4th. I missed the podium by just 0.069 seconds—69 hundredths of a second. That really stings.
0.069 seconds—that’s an incredibly tiny margin, as you can see in the picture:
I said it hurt, but that feeling only lasted a moment. The podium was so close—I felt like I almost had it one moment, and the next, I thought I had just missed out. My other goal was to surpass those who finished ahead of me in the National Time Trial Championships, and I accomplished that.
My time for the 85.2 km was 2:14:19.295, giving me an average speed of 37.1 km/h. Compared to last year’s results, I made significant improvements in both speed and placement, so the day ended well, and there was plenty to celebrate.
