July 28/17 14:42 pm - Canadians Finished 3rd & 4th at Jeux de la Francophonie

Posted by Editoress on 07/28/17
 

Canada's Lex Albrecht took third place in the women's road race at the Jeux de la Francophonie in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.  In the men's race, Félix Côté Bouvette finished fourth.  The Canadian team of six women and five men all came from Quebec.  Racers faced hot and humid conditions for the competition, on a circuit consisting of a 54 kilometre road circuit and multiple laps of an 8 kilometre finishing loop.

"The game plan was to make it a hard race from the start, and that's what the girls did," said coach Pascal Morin.

In the opening kilometres the 21 rider women's race broke apart, with five riders getting clear, including two Canadians - Elisabeth Albert and Frédérique Larose-Gingras.  In the final kilometres the race came back together, with Albrecht taking third in the sprint.  Elisabeth Albert, Frédérique Larose-Gingras and Alizée Brien took fifth, sixth and eighth places, respectively. Gabrielle Pilote-Fortin and Adriane Provost finished 11th and 13th.

"We were handcuffed in the breakaway. So, one by one, the girls tried to join them, and they almost all succeeded. There was another attempt to escape made by Frédérique and a French woman, the eventual winner. But the peloton came back and Frédérique got caught in the final sprint," Morin explained.

The men's race, with 82 riders, saw the peloton reach the finishing circuit together. "The peloton arrived grouped on the circuit," said the president of the Fédération québécoise des sports cyclistes (FQSC), André Michaud. "With about 80 kilometres to go, two Frenchmen, one Swiss, one Moroccan and Felix [Côté Bouvette] attacked. They rolled to the finish without being caught. The gap reached almost three minutes at one point. One of the French riders went off in the break with two laps to go. Felix worked hard to plug the hole, but it did not work. He gave everything he had to try to make it onto the podium."

Four other Canadians in the race - Olivier Brisebois, Simon-Pierre Gauthier, Elliott Doyle and Jean-François Soucy - finished 6th, 14th, 16th and 26th respectively.

At the end of the road race, the only cycling event presented as part of the multi-sport event, Quebec was second in women and third in men.

"There had to be about 10,000 people around the urban circuit. It was impressive. I've never seen that many before," Morin said of the impressive crowd that attended the cycling events.

Results from the men's and women road races at the Francophone Games on Thursdy the 27th in Abidjan, Ivory Coast