José Antonio García, fourth in Alcalá de Henares, where Juan Pedro López falls from the final podium of the Spanish Cup

XX Gran Premio Macario
Alcalá de Henares-Alcalá de Henares (155,3 km)

A new winner just 24 hours before the Vuelta al Bidasoa, Juan Pedro López from Seville could not finish on the podium of the Spanish Elite and U23 Cups. In the last race, the GP Macario of Alcalá de Henares, a race he reached with remote mathematical options for the title, Juanpe lost his third place to the winner in the last round of the tournament.

The Mallorcan Xavier Cañellas (Caja Rural) won at Cervantes Square, achieving the necessary points to climb to that third place. Antonio Soto (Lizarte) from Murcia won the Cup, while Jesús Arozamena (Aldro) from Pucela, second in the final overall, won the U23 title. In that sprint in which the Spaniard won, the Polartec-Kometa native from Granada, José Antonio García, finished in fourth place. With 226 points, Polartec-Kometa U23 finished fourth in the Spanish Cup team standings.

“The race went well. It’s got a bit of a stinker and tougher because of the wind. I finally got into a cut with Soto, but then we got caught. Looking ahead to the finish line, the last three kilometres were difficult. A lot of roundabout, a lot of curve. It wasn’t an easy ending. In the last kilometre there was a right turn where I entered something past and lost ground. I managed to fill the gap, but it wasn’t enough. I finished fourth, but with the feeling of having arrived stronger. The sensations are what count and in the face of the Ronde d´Isard we arrived with a good form point”, explains a Garcia that very soon, around kilometer 20, had to change his bike for a mechanical trouble.

Rafa Díaz Justo, director: “The Cup podium is fine if you haven’t done anything else. But if you’ve just come from winning a big event like Bidasoa, losing the drawer hurts less. Of course, it would have been better if we’d been third too. But it wasn’t easy and a sign is that the one behind Juanpe was the winner of the Macarius. I’ll stick with the positive things that this edition has left us, in which we had to manage a complicated situation halfway through the stage: a very large group was formed, where we took Sergio Hernández and Sergio García. But the two leaders of the general classification have won positions and that movement has forced us to change our plans. We had to stop the kids and start pulling back hard. With this movement we have managed to split the platoon, form a group of about twenty units and reach the escape. The choice with José Antonio was very good. Caja Rural did a lot of work, with a very good movement of the face of the final alley that gave them a few meters that were impossible to cover up”.

(automatic translation, sorry for mistakes)