Amgen Women's Race: Hall wins queen stage to South Lake Tahoe

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Katie Hall (UnitedHealthcare) won the Amgen Women's Race queen stage around South Lake Tahoe and took the overall lead of the race. Hall shook off her last companion, Tayler Wiles (Trek-Drops), on the finishing climb after the two had gone clear on the main climb of the day. Katarzyna Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM) finished in third place.

The stage started and finished in South Lake Tahoe and went into the mountains south of the lake, with two classified climbs plus the short finishing climb along the 108 kilometres. The main difficulty was the category 1 Daggett Summit cresting ten kilometres from the finish. 12.7 kilometres of climbing at an average of 6.1 percent were certain to leave only the strongest climbers fighting for the win.

The break of the day consisted of Lily Williams (Hagens Berman-Supermint) and sprinter Coryn Rivera (Team Sunweb) who had attacked within the first 10km. The duo held a lead of only 20 seconds over the category 2 climb after 22km. Williams tried to pull out a bigger advantage in the descent and ended up distancing Rivera who went back to the peloton.

On the flat stretch between the two climbs, Williams settled in for a long solo. Her advantage went up to two minutes with 50 kilometres to go. But the effort started to show, and when BePink took up the chase, the gap came down fast. Williams was caught with about 25km left to race, just before the start of the Daggett Summit climb, but she did get awarded the Most Courageous Rider jersey as a reward.

On the lower slopes, it was the Astana Women's Team who drilled the pace, causing many riders including overnight race leader Kendall Ryan (Team Tibco-Silicon Valley Bank) to get dropped. This attrition brought the peloton down to only 20 riders halfway up the climb when UnitedHealthcare took over to set up their leader Katie Hall.

When Hall made her move five kilometres from the summit, a group of five riders formed. Hall, Wiles, Niewiadoma, Erica Magnaldi (BePink), and Ruth Winder (Team Sunweb) were soon joined by Carolina Rodriguez Gutierrez (Astana Women's Team) and Sara Poidevin (Rally Cycling), and Winder had to let the others go.

Hall and Wiles attacked from this group 500 metres below the summit, and on the short downhill the two increased their advantage to half a minute. Hall attacked again once the road went up with 1.7 km to go and left Wiles behind as well, soloing to a repeat of last year's stage win and into the yellow leader's jersey. Wiles finished second 25 seconds down, Niewiadoma sprinted to third in a small group one minute behind.

Hall takes a 29-second lead into tomorrow's final stage, 70 km on a circuit in downtown Sacramento.

Listen to Hall talk about her stage 2 victory in the latest video from Voxwomen.

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