2006-08-05

After having attended the finish of the 4th stage in Hillerød earlier that day, in the evening we found ourselves in Elsinore to watch the all-important time trial. The weather was perfect and the setting awesome!

We arrived at Elsinore station at about 18:00, a few minutes before the first rider was scheduled to start just outside Kronborg Castle. The stage was a ca. 14 km long round tour beginning and ending at Kronborg with the city of Ålsgaarde being the turning point.

We walked across the old Dock island - once the site of Elsinore Wharf, one of the largest in Scandinavia. It turned out that the island had been "occupied" by a major fun fair as well by various sponsor of the Tour of Denmark race itself. We even came across some of my family, and then had a bit of food, before we walked the last 100m out to the road where the actual racing took place.

We were lucky enough to secure ourselves a bit of space right next to the finishing line, but we soon decided that on a stage like that it would be more fun to stand where the riders took off, instead of just watching them for two seconds as they finished. This proved to be a reasonable decision, as some of the pics will show.

Young danish talent Alex Rasmussen stunned most of the crowd as he came in first about half way through the stage in a great time. He was beaten in the end, but still managed to finish 3rd on the stage ahead of international time trial specialists such as Stuart O'Grady and Cadel Evans.

Man of the stage, however, was Fabian Cancellara, who came in an amazing 18 seconds ahead of second place Thomas Ziegler (T-Mobile); quite a big gap on such a short stage. He even took over the overall first place from team mate O'Grady.

We were too tired to watch the victory ceremony afterwards, and we had rather a long way home, so we went directly to Elsinore station and got on the first train back towards Copenhagen.

Read our description of the fourth stage here