Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez) has won the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, backing up her victory in the Torquay Surf Coast Classic earlier in the week and capping a potent team effort from her new squad. A select group containing most of the key favourites went to the finish together, the peloton having splintered on the second ascent of the short but steep Challambra Crescent. Karlijn Swinkels (UAE Team ADQ) was a spirited couple of bike lengths behind in second, with Swiss revelation – and Tour Down Under winner – Noemi Rüegg (EF-Oatly-Cannondale) rounding out the podium.
As clearcut as Wollaston’s win was, it was the culmination of a tense, tactical last hour: one in which Wollaston’s FDJ-Suez team came up trumps with three riders in the front group, finishing it off best despite the concerted efforts of a constantly-attacking Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto, EF-Oatly-Cannondale, Liv AlUla Jayco, alongside opportunistic moves from Norwegians Stine Dale (Coop-Repsol) and Mie Bjørndal Ottestad (Uno-X Mobility).
Many bike races begin and end something like this: a slow start, a frenzied finish, a bunch of teams throwing everything at the race in the hope that they’d come out on top. Cadel’s Race followed that script, a slowly ratcheting pressure-cooker of a thing that boiled over on the final lap, the second time up Challambra Crescent.
As soon as Wollaston opened up her sprint around 300 metres out, the race looked as good as over, but that’s not to say there weren’t question marks earlier. The Kiwi appeared to be struggling to maintain contact on the lead-in to the first ascent of Challambra, but as she explained after the race, that was just her “trying to find my own space … I knew it would be an all-out effort to get over the second time so I just wanted to get in the right mental space before heading up the second time.”
In fact, that second ascent wasn’t ridden with her own result in mind: Wollaston was a “backup plan” for today, and the team went “all in for Elise [Chabbey] the second time up Challambra. She was so strong,” Wollaston said, “but I was super comfortable sitting on.” She pauses for a moment here, smiles a little, checks herself in real time. “I wouldn’t say, actually, ‘super comfortable’,” she laughed. “It was really hard. But to make it over Challambra the second time on Dygert’s wheel, I knew I was in with a good shot.”
She’s an interesting rider, Wollaston – fast, punchy, and with a strong palmarès on both the road and the track: “a fast sprinter, but not the fastest,” in her own assessment. Throughout her career she’s balanced her time on the boards with her time on the tarmac, and this year is the first that she’s committing full-time to the road calendar. Almost full-time, anyway: she’s got a date with the Track Nations Cup in Turkey in March, a chance to she’ll show off her rainbow jerseys collected up in last year’s omnium and elimination World Championships “because otherwise I would never wear them.” That’s in addition to silver and bronze medals on the track from the Paris Olympics, and multiple national championships. Little wonder FDJ-Suez snapped her up in their 2025 recruitment drive, an accompanying press release labelling her “a pure talent”.
Speaking to a small cohort of media on the Geelong waterfront after her win, Wollaston was quick to credit the teamwork that had rapidly developed during her short time on the French team. There are different views she could have taken on that front – the forward-looking [how the team will fare in its biggest targets, like the Tour de France Femmes] and the immediate [the pressure-cooker of weeks living in each others’ orbits, far away from the European home base]. With a composure belying her age and the fact that she’d just raced a hard 142 kilometres, Wollaston opted for a bit of both.
The groundwork to today’s win began with disappointment on the opening stage of the Tour Down Under a couple of weeks ago, when Wollaston was second across the line after Daniek Hengeveld’s breakaway tore up the script. “We could have taken it really badly and been fed up and pissed off with the result, but I think the team really took it in our stride,” Wollaston reflected. At the core of FDJ-Suez’s success in turning it around is its communication: “We had a really good debrief following that race and figured out what we need to work on and what went wrong, and communication has been really good in the team since then – we had really good communication and really good debriefs and pre-race meetings and [we’ve] just been really open and honest with each other and what we want to get out of the racing – and the best way that we can win. It was definitely fuel for the fire for today and for Wednesday,” she said.
Wollaston’s turn of speed today meant that even for those standing alongside her on the podium, there was no point beating themselves up about being bettered. “I was hoping that I could beat Ally in the sprint, but when you see how her shape is, I’m also happy to be second,” said second-placed Karlijn Swinkels. No regrets from Noemi Rüegg,either: “I knew I could go home happy [after the Tour Down Under], and now to finish it off with another podium, it’s amazing.”
For Wollaston, there’s an entire season stretching out ahead of her: one in which her ambitions will need to dovetail with the likes of Vollering, Labous and Muzic. “Having riders like Demi and Juliette and Évita to support, and also to support me, I think will be really powerful moving forward,” she reflected, smiling. At 24 years of age, she’s already well-established, but there’s still a bit of wiggle room there, space to figure out of what kind of rider she wants to be rather than just what she is in the here and now. “If I can figure out a way to be the strongest sprinter at the end of a really hard race, that’s kind of the rider that I hope to be in the future – and today was a step in the right direction for sure.”
There are three little anecdotes that I could wrap this story up with: one direct, one a little more wistful, one philosophical. You can choose which one works better for you.
One: After wrapping up her post-podium media interviews, having spent about 10 minutes after a very hard race answering our questions with grace and composure, Wollaston had one more interview to give. A Cadel’s Road Race social media person stepped up and opened the interview with “Can I get a fuck yeah?” “Fuck yeah!” Wollaston responded, grinning widely.
Two: a pair of International Testing Agency chaperones, who’d been waiting to take Wollaston off for her post-win drug test, telling her – almost wistfully – that “you’re basically an honorary Australian now.” Wollaston smiled and agreed. “And we’d be happy to have you,” the ITA chaperone said, just audible above the ticking of Wollaston’s bike’s freewheel.
Three: On the top tube of her team bike as it was wheeled off by a soigneur as she walked beside it, there’s a little graphic that reads ‘Tomorrow is decided today’. Based on this result, tomorrow looks pretty bright for Ally Wollaston – but today was pretty good, too.
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