Greetings:

Our star Elite rider Jesse Mendonca won the 1/2pro District
Criterium Championship yesterday in Vacaville! All these years, a Lombardi Sports rider has never won the district criterium championships
until now! This was another super hot & smoky race with allot of attrition
in the field. Note only 39 riders finished out of 90 starters. Jesse broke away
from what was a front split in the peloton & soloed to victory a whopping
40 seconds ahead of the dwindling group. I participated in the race as well
& can tell you it was a difficult, hot race with one substantial climb on
the back side of the course. My personal race was made that much more difficult
by getting stung by a wasp on my right leg about halfway thru the race (&
yes I’m allergic to bee stings), then running out of water w/about 15min
to go, so not much fun for me! Our big win makes up for all the pain &
suffering however.

This is a HUGE win for the team & Jesse will have the
privilege of wearing a special California State Bear district champ jersey for
1 year for his victory. I will be working with our designer to produce this
special jersey with all our sponsors delineated. This will be a pretty cool jersey!

Circuit (90min) – Me and JP and our adopted U23 Micah. Started out pretty fast for the first 4 laps or so, lots of surges on the climb and that head wind at the top of the climb was a brick wall. The descent took a little while to get used to, thanks Darrin for the recommendation on the 11-tooth – yeah I was spinning that out each lap. Around the 6^th lap a move of 2 goes on the sweeps, and a Yellow Guy (team of 7 guys) went with it. I was bridging up and started to feel the burn and started thinking no way, too windy, and there were some big teams unrepresented. Could have should have would have closed my eyes and made that move, but decided to save up and fall back. Bad call, cause Lance Armstrong I mean Nathan English was one of the guys. He proceeded to drop the other two and solo around a big windy course for the next hour. Yellow man got dropped, and they put 4 guys on a concerted chase, but he still won with 2min. Slow race after that – hairy webcore metal man and I kept trying to pump the climb and split the group, but the headwind at the top killed all momentum, so we sat for the sprint, which was whatever. Came in for top 15 or so.