NOVINKY

Last week ATT Investments cyclists took part in the Czech and Slovak Road Cycling Championships and Mika Heming in the German championship. The best result was achieved by Matúš Štoček, who took 3rd place in the mass start race, beaten only by the winner Peter Sagan and the second Lukáš Kubiš from Dukla Bánská Bystrica.

The championship consisted of two parts. First, on Thursday 23 June, the individual time trial was held, followed by the mass start races on both days of the weekend. On Saturday the women raced together with the juniors and after them the juniors. On Sunday, the Elite and U23 men took to the start, with a single winner in a joint race.

Guests of ATT Investments were Czech road cycling legends Roman Kreuziger, the current sports director of the Bahrain Victorious team, and Ján Svorada, winner of 11 stages at the Grand Tours. The team then serviced selected riders from foreign teams during the mass start race.

In the U23 time trial, Michal Rotter and Jan Kašpar finished 5th and 7th respectively, behind the winning Mathias Vack, who is heading to the Trek-Segafredo World Team. In the Elite category, only Tomas Jakoubek of ATT Investments competed, and he pushed his way to 6th place when the experienced Jan Bárta, who has raced for the Bora-hansgrohe team in the past, won.

Sunday's race was attended by many of the biggest stars of Czech cycling today, such as Jan Hirt from the Belgian team Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert Materiaux, Pavel Bittner, from 1. Vojtěch Řepa, who races for the Spanish Kern Pharma, where he left ATT Investments for this year, the aforementioned Mathias Vacek, also Petr Vakoč, who raced with Mathieu Van der Poel in the Alpecin-Fenix team last year, Michal Schlegel from another Spanish team Caja Rural - Seguros RGA, Daniel Turek from the Austrian Felbermayr-Simplon Wels and Petr Kelemen from the Swiss Tudor Pro Cycling. Among the Slovak riders, the star of the highest magnitude is Peter Sagan from the TotalEnergies team.

Matěj Zahálka (Elkov-Kasper) dominated the Czech championship with a solo long breakaway. The best of the Czech ATT Investments riders was Karel Tyrpekl, who finished 19th. His teammate in the Slovakian branch of the championship, Matúš Štoček, did significantly better, finishing 3rd.

Mika Heming also did very well in the German championship. In the time trial of the U23 category, with 68 competitors, he took 14th place. He achieved an even more valuable position in the joint U23 and Elite category race, which was attended by the best cyclists from the top division teams such as the winner Nils Pollit from Bora-hansgrohe, his teammates Emanuel Buchmann and Lennard Kämna, as well as Nikias Arndt (DSM), who took 2nd place, and Simon Geschke (Cofidis), who stood on the 3rd podium among 137 riders.

It was a very difficult race, with the first 19 cyclists finishing one by one with noticeable time gaps and Mike Heming managed to get to 15th place at the age of 22, leaving behind riders from World teams like Pascal Ackermann (UAE Emirates), John Degenkolb (DSM), Max Walscheid (Cofidis) and Max Kanter (Movistar) etc.

The expectations of the ATT Investments team especially in Sunday's Czech Championship race were higher than the reality. Not everything always works out.  Which is always an incentive to do a more detailed root cause analysis. So far this season, the team has been performing very well, picking up as many UCI points as ever. Now it is up to the team management and the riders to build on the results that preceded the Czech championship in the very next race, which is the Sibiu Tour in Romania (2.1).