Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Shake-'n-Bake Jake; Cody On the Front

Former SB resident Jake Erker has been getting some nice press time recently. Despite taking a couple of multi-week breaks this year to rehab a sore knee, he's still snagging some good results. E.g., 3rd in the first stage of the Tour de Beauce, Canada's biggest stage race. Check out the video of stage 1 below (if the embedded video doesn't play, go directly to YouTube to view it).




The week before Jake got a couple top-20s in the prestigious Commerce Bank races in Pennsylvania, including at Philly where he had this fun time going into the final sprint. Check out the panicked look on his face! Yet somehow he made it through to get 17th.

photo © Charles M. Herskowitz



Current SB'er Cody O'Reilly (4th in line here) is also back east and probably riding on the front of the field at Beauce RIGHT NOW as I type this because his Kodak/SierraNevada teammate Mark Walters has the gc lead. Hopefully all those long Lake Casitas loops are paying off for Cody now!

BTW, if you missed it, Cody got a nice 4th at the Tour of Sommerville in New Jersey a few weeks back. That's one of the classic US races, and even dad Rory did it in the 70's!

Now, if only Cody would update his blog then we could get all the details of this and his other adventures back east!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool. Glad you have the update on Jake. I miss that guy on the Thursday AM rides. He was always there to rip our legs off. Super-nice guy; good to see him getting results.

Anonymous said...

And I love this quote in cyclingnews: "It was easy for me with my team," said Walters about his day in yellow. "The team covered a few moves and did a lot of work, but I think they'll be fine for tomorrow. I was really impressed with Cody O'Brien today - he's a track rider and he was pulling up and over these steep climbs. Then he went back and got us bottles before the next climb."

oh well... pretty close.

Marco Fanelli said...

Ha! Certainly the CN reporter messed it up, not his teammate. And now, as I just checked, CN mis-identified the Symmetrics rider in the stage-3 early break as Jake, even though the guy had on one of the classification jerseys. I just sent an email to Bjorn (one of two former SB'ers who now work for cyclingnews!) to let him know.

Anonymous said...

Is the Gregor Brown I see in bylines all the time on CN the same Gregor Brown that used to live in SB (and designed the red Team Fastrack kits)? I'm guessin' that's the other ex-SB'er...

Marco Fanelli said...

Yep, the same Gregor from SB. He had some big shoes to fill (Jeff Jones) but it seems like he's doing a good job.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the comments fellas. Cody was very impressive the last couple of weeks. He's even getting surly like the rest of us. I told him before one particularly nasty climb at Beauce, "This one's steep Code." "They're all steep", he replied. And it was true. But he did a tremendous amount of work for Walters and Rollin all week. I imagine he'll just get better and better in the coming years.
Jake