Annemiek van Vleuten wins Giro Rosa prologue

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Annemiek van Vleuten won the prologue of the Giro Rosa on Friday night. She averaged over 50 km/h on the 2.05 kilometre course. Rabo-Liv dominated the race as Van Vleuten finished ahead of her teammates Marianne Vos, Pauline Ferrand Prevot and Anna van der Breggen. Melissa Hoskins (Orica-AIS) was the first non-Rabo-Liv rider in the top 5.

"I am usually good with prologues," Van Vleuten told Cyclingnews straight after the finish. "I trained at altitude before the Giro Rosa and this prologue really was a goal."

Twenty teams and 157 riders in total lined up for the ten-day stage race in Italy. The prologue in Caserta, north of Naples, offered the riders a hot, humid and short ride. The first rider, Forno d’Asolo’s Daive Tuslaite, started just before the sun set at 8.30pm. Each rider faced a one kilometre straight road before a 180 degree turn for the same stretch back to the finish.

"The road was bumpy, to say the least," Giant-Shimano’s Marijn de Vries told Cyclingnews. The roads in Caserta were uneven, old slabs and with the sun set, it was hard to see the road ahead. "I was shaking so much that I couldn’t even see the first 200 metres," De Vries commented.

Despite the rough surface Van Vleuten managed to average 50,472 kilometres an hour. Her finishing time of 2.26.22 meant she was 0.81 seconds faster than Marianne Vos.

"Yeah we had to ride on these basalt blocks, just like last year in Florence at the world championships. I bounced from left to right but I am a heavier rider so I did okay."

The newly crowned Dutch time trial champion admits that the new jersey gave her wings. “This was the first time I got to show my red, white and blue jersey so that most definitely gave me extra motivation. The fact that the mechanics also painted my time trial bike in the national colours made me decide to right the time trial bike and not my road bike which I did consider at first.”

Rabo-Liv rides the Giro Rosa with three captains, world champion Marianne Vos who won the overall in 2011 and 2012 and her young teammates Pauline Ferrand Prevot and climbing ace Anna van der Breggen. "I know my place in the team," Van Vleuten said. "Tomorrow I’ll enjoy riding in the pink jersey and then someday I hope to pass it on to one of my teammates.”"

The first stage on Saturday takes place in Santa Maria a Vico and measures 95,2 kilometrs. It consists of eleven laps of 8.6 kilometres with a climb in each of the laps.

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