The race pressed on.
After the high-intensity battle, many riders had begun dropping off one after another.
But when the Kazakhstan team saw that Japan, China, Mongolia, Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, and others still had plenty of riders hanging behind them, they quickly communicated among themselves and rotated another domestique to the front to keep raising the pace.
After the race passed 60 km, the stretch leading up to around 90 km consisted entirely of short climbs, constantly rising and falling.
Although Kazakhstan had great confidence in the strength of their riders, they were not so blindly arrogant that they would skip recon work.
So, they were also extremely familiar with the characteristics of today's course.
As they pushed the average speed above 45 km/h over the next 30 km of rolling climbs, even sacrificing two domestiques from their own team, large numbers of riders from the other strongest Asian nations finally began dropping away as well.
Huang Chong glanced behind him. To his surprise, the first two riders to get dropped during those 30 km of battling were actually from the Longjiang Team.
Now, only Little Ma and Xue Ming remained beside him, gritting their teeth as they sheltered him from the wind and led the pace.
Among the Japanese riders, Shinya Arashiro and Yuma Koishi were still there.
Meanwhile, countries and regions such as South Korea, Iran, Mongolia, and Hong Kong were down to just one rider each.
Then, at around the 92 km mark, a landmark steep climb appeared.
The climb itself did not gain much elevation, only a few dozen meters, but its gradient reached roughly 8%, and it was 1.5 km long.
Huang Chong had paid special attention to this climb during his training recon. He knew that once they cleared it, there would be