Raabe Takes Lead in Tour of Costa Rica
by Rod Hughes
Costa Rican Henry Raabe of the BCR-Pizza Hut bicycle racing team grabbed the lead away from Cuban Ardonis Cardozo yesterday in the fourth phase of the Vuelta de Costa Rica (Tour of Costa Rica). Raabe leads the individual competition by two minutes.
This phase was a timed lap between the Nicoya Peninsula town of Filadelfia and a farm outside the Guanacaste provincial capital of Liberia. Liberia is 250 kms. northeast of San Jose. Because of the “wrinkled” nature of the country’s topography, the Tour of Costa Rica with its combination of chilly mountains, flat, hot tropical lowlands and high mountain valleys, is considered particularly grueling by bicycle racers.
In this particular phase, Raabe was the favorite to win on the flat, hot run and came in 11 minutes ahead of Cardozo and proving the experts right. This puts Raabe temporarily in the lead but the mountains lie ahead in the return to the Central Valley, so anything might happen before the final tape is broken.