Sofie van Rooijen (UAE Team ADQ) laid down a winning sprint on stage 2 of the Tour of Chongming Island turning stage 1's close run second place into a victory celebration in Chongming on Wednesday.
Van Rooijen jumped from Elisa Balsamo's (Lidl-Trek) wheel and while the Italian Lidl-Trek rider kept on the pressure on the left Mia Griffin (Roland Le Dévoluy) swept up the right to claim the runner-up spot while Balsamo had to settle for third.
"This one really means a lot to me. It’s been a tough year, both mentally and physically," said Van Rooijen in a team statement. "Over the past few months, I’ve started to feel better and better, and my only focus was China. I’m so happy to see that all the hard work over the past months has finally paid off."
The sprinters teams had been determined to make sure they had their chance again on the 128.6km stage from Shanghai to Chongming, chasing down a break of four that got a gap relatively late in the day of racing, with little more than 25km to go.
It included Giulia Giuliani (Roland Le Dévoluy), Catalina Soto (Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi), Anne Knijnenburg (VolkerWessels) and Marina Komina (Li Ning Star Ladies). Soto was soon dropped but the remaining three worked together to carve out a margin of over 40 seconds at 16km to go, falling to around 30 seconds at 10km to go and putting the break within sight of the peloton on the long straight roads.
At 6km to go Knijnenburg dropped, leaving the two ahead forging on with a gap soon falling below 20 seconds and the peloton was breathing down their neck at 3km to go and when the catch occurred at under 2km to go the set up for a bunch sprint well underway.
In stage 1 Austrian champion Kathrin Schweinberger (Human Powered Health) crossed the line first but was relegated so Australian rider Georgia Baker (Liv AlUla Jayco) was awarded the top spot on the stage and overall, with Van Rooijen and Griffin then taking the remaining podium spots.
They both moved up a podium spot on Wednesday, leaving Van Rooijen with her first victory of the season and first Women's WorldTour win, while Baker was fifth on stage 2 behind Cristina Tonetti (Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi). That meant Van Rooijen's win also put her in the overall lead, with the rider helped along by her move to claim top spot in the first intermediate sprint of the day. The UAE Team ADQ rider has an eight second advantage to second-placed Baker on the GC with Griffin in third, nine seconds back.
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The race concludes on Thursday with a 111.4km stage 3 around Chongming New City Park, finishing on a long and wide 3km finishing straight.
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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