Iran's Petrochemical Tabriz showed the rest of the world that they are a force to be reckoned with, as the team demonstrated great climbing prowess by taking stage win and almost all jerseys on Monday in the third stage of Tour de Qinghai Lake.

The stage, covering 173.3 kilometers, has two looming climbs and reaches the highest altitude of 3302 meters, over 1081 meters higher than this year's Tour de France highest mountain pass. Besides, the thundery sky and low temperature of about only 10 degrees centigrade made the race more torturous.

Yet amazingly, two riders from Tabriz, Ghader Mizbani Iranagh and Ahad Kazemi Sarai, began the attack on the lower slopes of the first climb to stay away until the finish.

Mizbani and Sarai were apparently two strongest riders on the stage which included a lung bursting Haute Category climb to over 3300 meters. As they crested that climb they had amassed an advantage of over five minutes to the chasing peloton of around sixty riders.

No one could follow their wheels after that. Mizbani finally won the stage with an incredible time of 4 hours 11 minutes and 19 seconds. Sarai, the best Asian rider of last year's event, grabbed the polka dot jersey. Their teammate Mizurov, retained overall leaders jersey and blue jersey but had to hand over the points jersey to Crotian sprinter Radoslav, who finished the race in the seventh place.

"I am happy with the win, " said Mizbani. "It is a difficult stage both for me and my friends, very difficult with a lot of hill roads. But we are happy as we get KOM mountain jersey, stage win and rank number 1 in team classifications."

"Tomorrow we will see what happens in the race, but the first thing our team needs to do is to keep the yellow jersey, that's for sure, " he said.

"After that if we can, sure we will for the stage win again. We don't care who will win the next stage or who will get the yellow jersey, so long as we keep the jersey in the team we will be happy."

(Xinhua News Agency July 21, 2009)