Good day and thank you for opening this week’s newsletter. I am still trying to wrap my head around the World Championships road race, how about you? And the season isn’t over yet! The Simac Ladies Tour starts next Tuesday, with six days of racing in the Netherlands, a time trial to start it off and a good amount of sprinting throughout the week. Then to close out the season the peloton will turn their attention to China for the Tour of Chongming Island and Tour of Guangxi.
Wheel Talk
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In a UCI communication just before the weekend, the governing body confirmed Milan-San Remo Women will join the WorldTour calendar in 2025. With the cancellation of Ronde van Drenthe, one of the longer-running races on the women’s side, the weekend between Strade Bianche and Trofeo Alfredo Binda was left blank for next season. With the inclusion of women in the Monument, the calendar once again is complete.
Previously Trofeo Alfredo Binda was typically held the day before the men’s Milan-San Remo but will move a week earlier, to March 16, so the women will race the three Italian one-day events over three successive spring weekends.
The women’s M-SR will take on March 22nd, the same day as the men’s. Although details about the route have yet to be revealed it’s assumed the finale of climbs will be the same. Chatter about the potential route has done the rounds; with a predicted start in Genoa the race would be about 150 km, 10 km short of the UCI Women’s WorldTour one-day maximum distance. Of course, RCS could get an exception to make the race even longer to honour the main feature of the men’s event, but whether or not the women really need a lengthy race to match the men’s 300 km slog is up for debate.
The best thing about women’s racing has always been the shorter, punchy nature of the racing. There’s no need to match the men’s events just because “it’s always been done this way.” The finale will still be exciting if the race is 150 km. But we will have to wait and see what kind of route the organizers decide to create.
Like the Tour de France, it won’t be the first edition of the race. A women’s Milan-San Remo existed from 1999 to 2005, called the Primavera Rosa. It will, however, be the first televised women’s Milan-San Remo.
Back at the old place cerca 2021, I wrote a fake race report about a fake women’s Milan-San Remo. It detailed how Lotte Kopecky overpowered a late-race move from Annemiek van Vleuten and Elisa Longo Borghini to win the race with Marianne Vos coming second ahead of Kasia Niewiadoma. Honestly … I can’t wait to see how close I was to reality.
Racing continues…
… at the UCI Gravel World Championships in Leuven, Belgium!
We also have two lower-level races this week including Binche Chimay Binche (which will be over by the time you’re reading this) and Giro dell’Emilia on Saturday. Both have some fantastic start lists and live coverage so worth tuning into. But the big event is UCI gravel worlds.
The Basics
When: Saturday, October 5th @ 12:00 CET
Distance: 134 km
The Course
Everything you might expect from a race allowed to tackle gravel in the Flemish region of Belgium. The course has been getting a bit of commentary for not having enough gravel.
The Contenders
Most of the best in gravel will be in attendance, as well as some top road riders. Lotte Kopecky will line up for Belgium and Dutch gravel national champion Lorena Wiebes will race. Defending champion Kasia Niewiadoma is not yet confirmed.
Wheel Talk Podcast
This week Matt de Neef and Matilda Raynolds joined me to break down the World Championships road race, or at least try to. We talked about some surprising performances, the winner’s never-give-up day and of course the Dutch. Plus, SD Worx-Protime has announced a new director for next year and Milan-San Remo will finally have a women’s edition in 2025.
Let’s Discuss
Demi Vollering backlash and the Dutch Worlds team’s “tactics.”
The Dutch women’s team performance at the World Championships is still a hot topic days later. Even male riders who watched the race before their own event were debating what the team could have been trying to accomplish on Saturday. The conclusion? Only eight people know the truth: the seven riders in the race and Loes Gunnewijk, the team director.
Gunnewijk is an ex-professional rider who has been director for the Dutch national team since at least 2020. She was also the team’s director for the Toyko Olympic road race, another memorable race for the Netherlands for not-great reasons.
“It was a bit difficult at some points and could have been done better,” Gunnewijk said after the race in an interview with Wielerflits. “We wanted to put pressure on during the race and we did, but in the final, we should have done this a little earlier, or we should have waited longer.”
At different points in the race, with multiple Dutch riders up the road, the remaining riders (minus maybe Puck Pieterse who seemed to be racing solely for the U23 title, one small victory for the nation) could be seen on the front of the peloton reeling the attackers back in. One of the most memorable moments was when Marianne Vos was up the road with Riejanne Markus, Ruby Roseman-Gannon and Justine Ghekiere.
At that point, the Dutch had the race in their hands. Vos has shown great form this year, especially at the Olympic road race. After the Games and winning the Points Classification at the Tour de France Femmes Vos returned to altitude to prepare for the Worlds. She’s been climbing on par with her old Giro d’Italia-winning days, and she’s one of the only riders this year who can both get over the climbs and best Kopecky in a sprint. Alas, behind the group Mischa Bredewold could be seen piloting the peloton, with Vollering on her wheel. Markus is not without fault, however. She could be seen chasing down a move containing Bredewold earlier in the race as well.
With around 38 km to go, when Markus was off the front with Ghekiere, the two had a 24-second advantage on the peloton and behind it was a mass of Dutch teammates driving the pace. Markus, although not the out-and-out favourite of the race, has won multiple races by getting up the road and using her time-trialling skills to hold the gap to the end.
Even with that puzzling teamwork, with 24 km to go the group of four had over a minute advantage – more than enough for Vos to take the title.
Ultimately it was attacks from Liane Lippert and Elisa Longo Borghini that brought back the four, but at that point, the Dutch team still had the advantage. Kopecky was distanced, with Vollering, Vos and Markus at the front of the race. Vos and Markus were both under pressure at that point and struggling to maintain contact with the front, and Vollering kept the pressure on, rightly so. Kopecky was gone.
Where Vollering is catching the most heat is for her actions in the final 10 km. After all the effort, the group at the front all sat up allowing Chloe Dygert, Kopecky and Vos to regain contact with the front. Soon after Markus was back as well. At that point, Vollering’s chances were done but the Dutch still had a chance at the top step. They could have turned defensive, ridden for Vos, and given the three-time road World Champion a chance to win from a select sprint. Markus was in on the plan and could be seen patrolling the front.
Instead, on the final climb of the three notable ones, Vollering attacked and left her two teammates behind. The move would have been deemed a success if she’d distanced Kopecky, but the defending World Champion held on. Vollering then turned into defensive mode, and when Longo Borghini attacked with 5.5 km to go Vollering stalled. Kopecky challenged her and Vollering caved, using her energy to pull back the Italian.
“It would of course be great if we could communicate via the earphones,” Gunnewijk said of the race. “Then you can provide the riders with a little more information along the way. That’s very difficult for the car and for the riders, it’s sometimes also difficult to assess the situation on the bike. Then you could have steered them even more.”
One of the problems with the Dutch team’s approach to the race was definitely communication, but those issues likely didn’t start with 10 km to go. The communication issues would have come already weeks before the race, when initial discussions of who the leader was took place, and again in the pre-race meeting.
When trying to determine exactly what the team was doing during the race we can try to pick apart the team plan from the start. Perhaps it was a two-leader approach, with a domestique for each leader (Vos + Markus and Vollering + Bredewold), but a two-leader approach means one team has multiple options, not that one team is split down the middle.
Gunnewijk said that perhaps Vollering wanted to win a bit too much, but that still doesn’t account for what the plan actually was. Despite only one rider pulling on the rainbow jersey, cycling is a team sport. Kopecky had Ghekiere clearly working for her, despite being put in a fantastic position to finish on the podium; as the Dutch showed, having the strongest team in the race means nothing if they are racing each other.
One thing is clear, the riders weren’t sure what they were doing, who they were riding for and what the plan was going in.
“Everyone is disappointed. Were mistakes made? Things could have been done differently, but it’s always easy to talk afterwards,” Gunnewijk said. “If we could race again, we would have handled certain things differently. But in the end, it’s still racing: anything can happen along the way. You can talk about it as much as you want, but it’s still racing.”
Vollering may have made some questionable moves, but she isn’t the sole reason the Dutch didn’t win. Mistakes were made all over the place, by multiple members of the Dutch team. A team is only as strong as its leaders, and that means the leader on the bike and the leader in the car. The problem for the Dutch in Toyko was that they didn’t know the race situation. Without race radios, a domestique/team captain is needed to go to the car, gather information about the race, and return to the peloton to relay that information. That never happened, and there was clearly no captain in this World Championships either.
In the end the Dutch not only lost the race, they failed to land a rider on the podium for the first time in 10 years. They could have gone all in and made the race harder and distanced Kopecky, they could have ridden all in for Vos and worked for a select group sprint, they could have … they could have …
The point here is that Vollering shouldn’t be the sole target of criticism. Look to management, especially when the situation has happened more than once.
Gunnewijk is stepping down from Dutch cycling after this season, and who knows, maybe we will see a united Dutch team at the start of Worlds in Rwanda. To go from three in the front of the race with 10 km to go to no one on the podium will surely drive the Dutch federation to question the inner workings of the team.
For now, their inability to work together means a more wide-open race, unless Kopecky is able to claw her way back into the fray.
A picture worth a couple of words
Taylor Swift corner
Taylor Swift is at such a level that anything she does seems to boost her hair/clothes/likes and dislikes. She’s seen out in a Reformation dress or posts a video wearing a small exercise apparel brand and they both sell out. The same can be said of her effect on other musical artists.
While at the US Open a few weeks ago Swift was seen singing along to “I Believe in a Thing Called Love,” the third single off The Darkness’ 2003 debut album “Permission to Land.” The viral video of Swift and her significant other Travis Kelce dancing to the song drove streams up 70%. More than two decades after the song’s release, having only peaked at number two on the UK charts when it was new, The Darkness (the band) reached the top spot in the iTunes Rock charts.
What people might not realize is that it wasn’t the first time Swift air-guitared to the song. Back in 2016, Swift starred in a series of Apple Music commercials (post Apple Music letter … that will be for another time), one of which featured “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.”
Swift has called the song “one of the best of all time” and even wrote a personal letter to the band’s lead singer Justin Hawkins when he attended the Eras Tour in Zurich (see what I did there) with his daughter this summer.
Until next time
Before I wrap up this week’s newsletter I wanted to touch briefly on the great tragedy from the World Championships last week. The passing of Muriel Furrer following a crash in the Women’s Junior road race on Thursday cast a dark shadow over the weekend of racing. A minute of silence was held at the start of both the men’s and women’s elite races, and competitors from both remembered the 18-year-old Swiss rider in interviews post-race.
Bike racing is already a dangerous sport, and it is the job of the governing body to make the sport as safe as possible. On Saturday, a day after Furrer succumbed to her injuries, the UCI held a press conference about the accident. David Lappartient and the Worlds organizing committee failed to answer most questions about the crash and the reaction by officials afterwards. On Monday the location of the incident was released, with no further information.
Through their own investigation, Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that the first helicopter in the Zürich area didn’t depart until over an hour after the finish of Furrer’s race. Reports speculate the crash occurred around 11:00 CET and that Furrer was found only at 12:33.
Lappartient cited the ongoing police investigation for the UCI’s inability to provide answers, and of course, sensitivity needs to come into play when dealing with a situation like this, but the rumours going around about the incident raise major concerns about the safety of the women’s junior event – and possibly others – and the governing body’s ability to do its job properly.
If it’s true that Furrer was not found until over an hour after the first junior woman crossed the line, and only because the Swiss team went to the organizers because they were missing a rider, then at some point serious safety aspects of the race were overlooked. Almost five days after the incident it is still unclear if anyone actually saw Furrer crash, or even knew that she had gone down.
On Sunday in a different interview, Lappartient stated, “In the peloton, half of the crashes are caused by the behaviour of the riders, so it is not always the fault of the organizer or the UCI.”
Some things are out of the control of the UCI and race organizers, but it is their job to make sure the races are safe, and last week the World Championships took a young woman’s life.
That is all, I’ll be back next week. Thanks for reading.
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