The FITWC arrives to Marseille
By TMX Archives on 24th Jan 07
The Palais des Sports of Marseille, with sitting capacity for more than 6000 people, will host next Friday the 26th of January the third round of the Indoor Trial World Championship 2007. At the moment the Spanish rider Toni Bou leads the Championship, after his triumphs in Granada and in St Petersburg.
The 16e Trial Indoor de Marseille, a traditional round of the indoor calendar, starts at 8:30 pm local time (GMT+1) and will consist of 7 sections and one double lane race. This time, there will be eight participants, because the French rider Jerome Bethune is going to participate as the third wild card. Anyway there will be only three places in the final lap to fight for the podium.
After two superb performances, Bou is going to try his third consecutive victory and he'll have a great advantage: he'll be the last rider attacking the sections of first lap. The young Catalan, 20 years old, will try to increase the advantage of 6 points that he has in the general standings ahead of Adam Raga. The Gas Gas's rider arrives to this round trying to forget the mechanical problems he suffered in Russia, and Marseille has been always a great round for him, as he won the last three times there.
Furthermore, the nowadays world champion is going to fight for his first triumph of 2007, after two times without being on the top of the podium. This didn't happen since 2004, as he was second in Sheffield and in Koblenz and before winning again in Marseille.
Another Spanish favourite is Albert Cabestany, who also wants a victory in France to make score distances with his rivals shorter.
For their part, Dougie Lampkin and Takahisa Fujinami continue fighting for a podium, after loosing twice the opportunity of achieving it. The British has been four times on Marseille's podium and the Japanese hopes he can show his progression with good results.
The Catalan Jeroni Fajardo and the Polish Tadeusz Blazusiak, both riding with Beta, will be together with Bethune the ones who will attack the sections first and open the 16e Trial Indoor de Marseille.