Matt Cooke racing his TT rig to perfection with the Ride Clean Team in 2009

After spending the last two years on big and successful professional cycling teams, racing as an amateur with a smaller budgeted team was not what I wanted to do for the 2009 season. The experience proved to be a really good one for me and turned out to be fun at the same time.  The Ride Clean Team for 2009 was composed of mostly young guys from Arizona and I was the one stand out from Colorado.  Even though we had a small budget we were still supported at every race, I was really impressed with those guys.  At Redlands we stayed in a mansion that makes me think twice about having cycling as a career.  The 12 year old kid at the house could play the cello, speak Chinese and annihilate me at Nintendo Wii.  Redlands was such a hard race, that damn Sunset Loop on the last day never gets any easier.  I really don’t want to think about it, I am only now just getting over that pain.

Matt Cooke on the podium, second from left - looking fit!

The next race was Tour of the Gila where the big news was that Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer and Chris Horner were racing.  The first day was a mountain top finish and I ended up getting 4th and beating Lance!  I was very happy to be riding so well.  All week long everything felt so easy and I was looking forward to the last day’s stage, which featured a lot of climbing and another mountain top finish.  Sadly I never made it that far. After only a few miles the peloton was sheltering itself by riding in the shoulder of the road because of strong winds.  Everyone was racing fast, wheel to wheel trying to stay safe and save energy for later in the race.  Without any warning the rider on my right hit a large rock in the road with his front wheel.  I can still remember seeing his wheel make impact with that damn rock.   He went over his bars and into me.  I hit the ground with my head and shoulder.  I was taken to the hospital with the other rider who had face planted into the concrete.  My collarbone was broken and my whole race was over even before it began.

I ended up getting surgery to fix the collarbone. The doctor did an amazing job by the way, and I was riding again after a month, pretty amazing I think.

I think this picture explains it all, not a fun time for my poor collarbone!

I bounced back and had a good end of the season with a 12th overall at Tour of Utah and 3rd at the Green Mountain Stage Race, a race I had won in 2006.  But 3rd was great and I’m happy with it.

After many phone calls and sending out even more resumes I am happy to say I am on a pro team again for 2010.  It is called Team Mountain Khakis.  They have been mostly a criterium focused team but they are making a strong push for stage racing success next year.  I hope I can live up to what they want out of me and what I want out of myself. For now stay in touch for some more updates from me throughout the New Year, and check out the site of my new team – www.teammountainkhakis.com

Happy New Year!