The best race of 2020 is back! The 2021 Cúp truyền hình Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, otherwise known as the HTV Cup, is underway. It's a mammoth undertaking, longer than the Grand Tours in fact - this year's edition is not quite up to the 30 stages of 2018, but we do have 22 stages over 25 days, in the fashion of an older Grand Tour. The total length is 2450km, and the number of teams has increased to 15, starting in Cao Bằng at the very north of the conutry and working its way south, largely through the coastal areas once they pass Hanoi, to the traditional finish. The restrictions on the number of overseas riders coming in have remained, so we are restricted to just a handful. Loïc Désriac and last year's winner Javier Sardá Pérez are both back to duke out the upper echelons of the GC, but Jordan Parrá has elected to stay in Colombia and not return to Ynghua, while Iran's Ali Khazemi is listed as an entry, but I haven't been able to locate him as of yet. But who is back is The Man. The TV host's name is The Man. I kid you not.
Some new threads for a couple of the teams - The two Hồ Chí Minh City teams have new sponsors; the 'red team' of defending champion Javier Sardá Pérez are now in a sort of gold/yellow outfit with shorts that look alarmingly Ag2r brown and known as Vinama-TP Hồ Chí Minh, whereas the 'orange team' of sprint specialist Lê Nguyệt Minh are now clad in a darkish blue and known as TP Hồ Chí Minh-NEWGROUP. The blue is noticeably darker than Bikelife, however, so they should be easily distinguishable. Most of the other teams are familiar to those of us who got into this last year, starved of pro cycling, and were transfixed by this strange new world - the bold primary colours of Domesco Đồng Tháp and the Phonak-alike outfits of their sister team Dopagan; the Groupama-FDJ styled jersey of Vinh Long and, most importantly, the insanely epic and awesome
Quân Khu 7 jersey, that manages to be both stylish, well-designed, more professional than most within this péloton whilst simultaneously it couldn't be more transparently Communist if it had a stylised portrait of Lenin on the back.
The race got underway with a circuit race in Cao Bằng that was just 45km in length - 5 laps of a 9km circuiit which ran along a highway through a carved path through the hillside, so had a bit more up and down than is commonly seen in these crit type stages on the HTV Cup, and with a slightly uphill ramp up to the line. With a lot of the money for cycling in the south of the country, it was largely the smaller local teams and the Quân Dội team that attempted breakaways, but ulitmately the bunch sprint was not to be denied, and it was Lê Nguyệt Minh that proved strongest, ahead of last year's runner-up Nguyễn Tấn Hoài, whose quest to accumulate enough in bonus seconds to enable him to manage his losses against the Europeans and Nguyễn Hoàng Sang, probably Vietnam's best all-rounder, when the hills and mountains begin. Keep an eye out for Võ Thành An also - he won a stage in a breakaway in the hills last year and is seen as Vietnamese cycling's great young hope, he crashed out before we got to see him in the
real climbs last year, whic his a shame for him since obviously last year was a unique chance for these guys to get on view for the world.
Stage 1: Cao Bằng - Cao Bằng, 45km
1 Lê Nguyệt Minh (TP Hồ Chí Minh-NEWGROUP) 1:00:07
2 Nguyễn Tấn Hoài (Domesco Đồng Tháp) +st
3 Huỳnh Thanh Tùng (Quân Khu 7) +st
4 Lê Ngọc Sơn (Tập đoàn Lộc trời An Giang) +st
5 Trịnh Đức Tâm (Tập đoàn Lộc trời An Giang) +st
6 Trần Tuấn Kiệt (Dopagan Đồng Tháp) +st
7 Nguyễn Hoàng Sang (BikeLife Đồng Nai) +st
8 Nguyễn Dương Hồ Vũ (Vinama-TP Hồ Chí Minh) +st
9 Nguyễn Tuấn Vũ (Vinama-TP Hồ Chí Minh) +st
10 Thái Ngọc Hải (620 Châu Thới Vĩnh Long) +st
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