Van der Breggen wins La Fleche Wallonne Feminine

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Anna van der Breggen (Boels-Dolmans) continues to dominate the women's Flèche Wallonne, taking her fourth consecutive victory in the race. With her third UCI Women's WorldTour (WWT) victory of the 2018 season, van der Breggen also moves into the overall lead of the WWT classification that she won last year.

Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio (Cervélo Bigla) finished second and Megan Guarnier (Boels Dolmans) rounded out the podium.

Starting and finishing in Huy, the race covered 118.5km in the Belgian provinces of Liège and Luxembourg. The difficulties were stacked in the second half of the race, with the steep climbs of Côte d'Ereffe, Côte de Cherave and Mur de Huy each climbed twice in the last 50km.

There were several breakaway attempts in the first hour, but only after 32km did the first rider get away from the peloton. Doris Schweizer (Team Virtu Cycling) built a one-minute lead and was caught by a chase group of four riders with 55km to go.

These five riders entered the Côte d'Ereffe together and still held an advantage of 1:10 minutes at the top. Canyon-SRAM took over the chase work in the peloton and reduced the gap to 20 seconds coming into the Côte de Cherave, where a peloton of some 40 riders caught the break. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Canyon-SRAM) accelerated on the climb, but had van der Breggen on her wheel immediately.

In the last 35 kilometres, the race was definitely on - but unfortunately for the fans of women's cycling, there was no live TV coverage of the race, making the Flèche Wallonne the first UCI Women's WorldTour race of the year not to be broadcast live at all.

Ferrand-Prévot's move led to a group of 14 riders including most pre-race favourites distancing the rest of the peloton. In the flat run-in to Huy, four riders attacked out of this group: Megan Guarnier (Boels Dolmans), Ferrand-Prévot, Janneke Ensing (Alé Cipollini), and Amanda Spratt (Mitchelton-Scott) came onto the Mur de Huy together and crested the top 25 seconds ahead of a reduced peloton.

The four frontrunners held an advantage of between 40 and 50 seconds for much of the 29km circuit. Margarita Victoria García (Movistar Team) chased on her own between the front and the peloton, but never came closer than 25 seconds. The gap shrunk to 20 seconds on the Côte de Cherave, but the break could hold those 20 seconds until the foot of the 1.3-kilometre Mur de Huy (climbing at an average of 9.6%, with a maximum gradient around 20%).

The peloton, led by Moolman-Pasio, soon closed the gap to the front on the lower slopes of the finishing climb, but Spratt and Guarnier held strong and stayed in front for a sizable portion of the climb. Moolman-Pasio and van der Breggen eventually passed them on the steepest part and had enough left in their legs to compete for the win.

Van der Breggen and her teammate Guarnier rode on the front from around the 300-metre mark, blocking the way for Moolman-Pasio for a while. The South African accelerated past van der Breggen when a gap opened with 150 metres to go, but the Dutchwoman reacted immediately and sprinted to her fourth consecutive Flèche Wallonne victory ahead of Moolman-Pasio and Guarnier.

Van der Breggen also takes the overall lead in the UCI Women's WorldTour ahead of the next race, Liège-Bastogne-Liège on Sunday, April 22.

Watch the Voxwomen interview with Van der Breggen and the final kilometre of the women's Flèche Wallonne in the two videos below.

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