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Sophia Sammons (Team Redcat) and Oliver Bleddyn (Team Brennan) claimed solo victories in the stage 2 Gunns Plain road race at the Tour of Tasmania, the second round of the 2026 ProVelo SuperLeague.
Bleddyn, an Olympic gold medallist on the track, carved out a gap of 18 seconds to runner-up Oscar Gallagher (CCACHE x Bodywrap) after going solo while William Heffernan (Randwick Botany Cycling Club) was third in the men's 126.9km road race on the Gunns Plain Loop from Penguin.
"We had the numbers there after the climb," said Bleddyn in a team Instagram post, explaining that they used them to launch multiple attacks. "Brendo [Brendan Davids] went, he came back and I just went over the top at maybe around 15km to go, maybe a bit under."
It was an emphatic victory for Australia's U23 time trial champion Sammons in the 86.6km women's race, with the 20-year-old carving out a 1:46 margin to a group of 14 that crossed the line on the same time. Katelyn Nicholson (Butterfields Ziptrak) took the runner-up spot while her teammate Keely Bennett was third.
The men's course included four challenging climbs as they took on two full loops of the circuit while for the women the second loop was a shortened version which cut out one ascent of the longer climb of the two on the circuit.
Cameron Ivory (Launceston Mountain Bike Club) and Ruby Taylor (Team Redcat) claimed the first stage, a 600m long, zig zagging time trial. The racing in the four-stage event continues with a 73.6km road race from Poatina on Saturday and then on Sunday the final stage is a criterium in Launceston.
After the Tour of Tasmania the next round of the top-tier domestic race series will be the Melbourne to Warrnambool and Warrnambool Women's Cycling Classic, which was delayed by two weeks after fires in the vicinity of the course in late January. The men's event will now run on February 28 and the women's on March 1.
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Simone is a degree-qualified journalist that has accumulated decades of wide-ranging experience while working across a variety of leading media organisations. She joined Cyclingnews as a Production Editor at the start of the 2021 season and has now moved into the role of Australia Editor. Previously she worked as a freelance writer, Australian Editor at Ella CyclingTips and as a correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg. Cycling was initially purely a leisure pursuit for Simone, who started out as a business journalist, but in 2015 her career focus also shifted to the sport.
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