The reduced sprint at stage 1 of Simac Ladies Tour(Image credit: Getty Images)
European champion Lorena Wiebes (Team DSM) won stage 1 of the 2022 Simac Ladies Tour, a flat 141.2 km around Lelystad, in the sprint of a group of 19 riders.
A crash with about 80km to go split the race, and the first group of 21 riders kept going. They built a gap of up to 1:20 minutes to the rest of the peloton and held on to the finish, only losing two riders to mechanicals.
Led out by her teammate Charlotte Kool, Wiebes had no trouble beating Karlijn Swinkels (Team Jumbo-Visma) and Audrey Cordon-Ragot (Trek-Segafredo) to win the sprint and take the first leader's jersey.
“It was still a hard race because of the wind, harder than a normal flat race. After the finish, it went up on the dyke. We knew that there would be echelons there, and you have to be at the front and just go through. It mainly split because of a crash, and in our team, we were in doubt whether we should keep going as Pfeiffer [Georgi, ed.] was in the second group, but in the end the gap was big enough to get to the finish with a small group,” Wiebes said.
In the general classification, Wiebes is now five seconds ahead of Swinkels and five seconds ahead of Cordon-Ragot.
“Tomorrow is another chance for a sprint, so of course we will go for it again, and then it gets harder and harder. I hope to take the good legs with me, especially to Limburg,” Wiebes said.
How it unfolded
The stage started and finished in Lelystad, the capital of the Dutch province of Flevoland almost entirely made up of reclaimed polder land. Consequently, much of the stage that consisted of two and a half laps of a 60.4-kilometre circuit was actually below sea level.
Despite the low altitude, a QOM sprint was held at the second passage of the finish line to find a wearer of the polka-dot jersey. Two intermediate sprints offered opportunities to pick up bonus seconds, but no points for the points classification which is exclusively calculated on stage results.
Crosswinds split the peloton for the first time after 23 kilometres, but the groups eventually came back together before the first intermediate sprint that was won by Alison Jackson (Liv Racing Xstra) ahead of Georgi and Wiebes.
A first crash forced a couple of riders including Coryn Labecki (Team Jumbo-Visma) to abandon, but another mass crash after 60km had an even bigger influence on the race. It happened near the front of the peloton, and only 21 riders were not held up by the crash, opening a gap on the rest of the peloton. Several of the crashed riders including Christine Majerus (Team SD Worx) and Shari Bossuyt (Canyon-SRAM) also had to abandon the race.
The front group included four riders each from Trek-Segafredo (Cordon-Ragot, Lauretta Hanson, Elynor Bäckstedt, and Chloe Hosking) and Liv Racing Xstra (Jackson, Silke Smulders, Jeanne Korevaar, and Eva Buurman), three riders each from Team DSM (Wiebes, Kool, and Franziska Koch) and Team Jumbo-Visma (Swinkels, Anna Henderson, and Romy Kasper) as well as Lonneke Uneken and Chantal van den Broek-Blaak (both Team SD Worx), Mischa Bredewold (Parkhotel Valkenburg), Soraya Paladin (Canyon-SRAM), Eugénie Duval (FDJ SUEZ Futuroscope), Eleonora Gasparrini (Valcar-Travel & Service), and Ruby Roseman-Gannon (Team BikeExchange-Jayco).
They worked together well and increased their advantage, soon putting over a minute into the second group where only FDJ SUEZ Futuroscope and Team BikeExchange-Jayco had an interest to chase. Swinkels won the QOM sprint as well as the second intermediate sprint where she picked up three bonus seconds ahead of Cordon-Ragot and Jackson. Buurman lost contact with the group, and Hosking suffered a puncture 12km from the finish, leaving 19 riders in front.
Trying to anticipate a sprint against Wiebes, Liv Racing Xstra started the attacks in the last 20km with Korevaar and Smulders taking turns to attack. None of their attempts was successful, however, and Team DSM kept the pace high in the final to prevent further attacks.
Nevertheless, Van den Broek-Blaak managed to jump away at the two-kilometre mark, but she was caught again before the flamme rouge. Kool led Wiebes through the three turns on the last kilometre, and the European Champion easily won the sprint. The peloton finished 49 seconds behind.
Lukas Knöfler started working in cycling communications in 2013 and has seen the inside of the scene from many angles. Having worked as press officer for teams and races and written for several online and print publications, he has been Cyclingnews’ Women’s WorldTour correspondent since 2018.
