It took five months from the start of Charlotte Kool’s 2024 season before the standout sprinter picked up her first victory at July’s Baloise Ladies Tour, but the DSM Firmenich-PostNL rider wasted no time getting things going at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. Kool blasted off the front of a hard-charging pack in the closing meters of stage 1 to take a clean victory over Anniina Ahtosalo (Uno-X Mobility) and Elisa Balsamo (Lidl-Trek).
Kool’s win came at the end of a hectic, urban course that made up in technicality for what it lacked in verticality. The 123 km route from Rotterdam to The Hague took place largely on city streets, which saw a number of crashes. Into the final five km no team asserted control in what was a somewhat disorganized finale. SD Worx-Protime was best situated, but when Barbara Guarischi started her lead-out it was Kool and not Guarischi’s teammate and stage favorite Lorena Wiebes – who’d suffered a bike problem in the final kilometer – launching clear to take the win over a surprise second place in Ahtosalo.
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How it happened
- 154 riders took the start in Rotterdam for the first foreign start in the TdFF’s short history. Thanks largely to the Paris Olympics, the race won’t even set wheel in France until stage 5. But one plus side of the Dutch start was large crowds, similar to those that have greeted the men’s Tour when it has started in Rotterdam in 2010 and 2015.
- (Mostly) fresh legs and a technical urban course produced a few early crashes, including one in the neutral start involving TdFF debutante Puck Pieterse (Fenix-Deceuninck) and another, later on in the race proper, which took down Fem van Empel (Visma-Lease a Bike), FDJ-Suez’s Grace Brown and Lizzie Deignan of Lidl-Trek.
- Despite a few attacks, not much got going and not for very long throughout the race. The flat course didn’t offer much in the way of climbing to spring any moves, but with one QOM on the route, the two-meter (not a typo) Maasdeltatunnel “climb,” Cristina Tonetti (Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi) made a savvy move to get clear and take top points and with it the first QOM jersey of the race.
- Into the final 10 km multiple teams hit the front to keep the pace high, including SD Worx, DSM, Visma and Liv AlUla Jayco, all looking to keep their sprinters up front. But no team really controlled, and even when defending Tour champion Demi Vollering hit the front to ride for Wiebes the pack stayed fairly compact instead of lined out.
- Into the chaotic finale, Wiebes wasn’t near the front and few riders were attached to a lead-out of note. Guarischi launched her kick early and Kool jumped around – too early, she thought – but her acceleration was unmatched and she showed a clean gap to Ahtosalo and Balsamo on the line.
It was really hectic but I like it. I kept thinking, ‘I like chaos.’ Then I went so early and I thought, ‘Oh it’s too long,’ and it hurt so bad but in the end it was enough.
-Charlotte Kool on the chaotic finale
Brief analysis
- Kool’s win was at best a minor upset (even in a quiet season she is one of the best sprinters in the sport, after all) but Ahtosalo was not a name on everyone’s lips at the start. She may be now. Just 20 years old, this is her third season on Uno-X and she’s the three-times defending Finnish national champion in both the road race and time trial. Now, she’s best young rider in the Tour de France Femmes.
- In an interesting bit of symmetry, Kool’s win means that DSM has taken the opening stage and first yellow jersey in both the men’s and women’s Tour this year – Romain Bardet won stage 1 and took yellow at the men’s Grand Depart in Florence in late June.
- In April, the small Continental team Tashkent City made news with an official automatic invite to the TdFF thanks to topping the rankings over other, better-known teams after a savvy (and controversial) strategy in 2023 of stacking UCI Asia Tour events in search of points. But the TdFF could hardly have started worse as an argument for why they belong in the race, as four of their seven starters DNF’d already. As teams like Lifeplus-Wahoo fold partly because they missed out on a TdFF invite, it’s a stark reminder that there are massive consequences around the rules for automatic entries to major races.
- For Wiebes and SD Worx, stage 1 was also a frustrating day as the team did significant work to set up its star sprinter only to see her chances quite literally derailed when another competitor apparently hit her bike in the final kilometer and caused a shifting problem that prevented her from contesting the sprint. She’ll have another chance on stage 2.
Up next
Tuesday is a very unusual split-stage day, with a mass-start stage in the morning and short individual time trial in the afternoon. We’ll have more on this later today, but split stages are essentially extinct from WorldTour racing per UCI rules, and the ASO had to get special dispensation to hold one. Stage 2 is a 68 km ride from Dordrecht back to Rotterdam. It’s as pan-flat as today (total climbing: 77 meters) and looks to be about as hectic. Stage 3 is a 6.3 km TT in Rotterdam that, amazingly, does not look nearly as technical.
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