Puck Pieterse (Alpecin-Deceuninck) delivered another dominant performance, taking her third women's elite cross-country victory from the four rounds of the Mountain Bike World Cup series run so far this season.
The 21 year old crossed the line with a 52 second advantage to Martina Berta (Santa Cruz RockShox) who took second, and her best World cup result, in the process delivering the home crowd plenty to cheer about as it was Italy's first top 3 finish in the elite women's category since 2014. Rebecca Henderson (Primaflor Mondraker Genuins) came third.
“I chose to ride aggressively since the beginning, and I was full gas already at the end of the first lap. Since then, I tried to go with my pace and don’t look back and well, it worked once again” said Pieterse.
A chase group of Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Berta, Allesandra Keller and Stigger formed early in the race, later joined by Henderson, but Ferrand-Prévot later crashed, ultimately finishing eighth, while Keller also fell back into 11th while Stigger finished just behind Henderson to take fourth.
Even though Pieterse held off the chase, it still wasn't all smooth sailing for the Dutch rider who also took victory in Leogang and Nove Mesto.
“I made a mistake in the last lap, but I knew I had quite some gap. It happened on the toughest part of the race, where you are almost still because of the many roots on the course," said Pieterse. "In every lap I tried to keep my best focus, but my heart rate was so high that I couldn’t keep going. Since that moment I reset and started to push again on the first climb to get my pace back”
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