Charlotte Kool sprints to 2nd at Scheldeprijs after team chase down dangerous break

One-day racing for the women’s peloton continued on Wednesday with Scheldeprijs. Taking place on a pan-flat parcours, the major obstacle of the day would be the cobbled section of Broekstraat. On the penultimate passage at roughly 25 kilometres to go a strong pace was set and a dangerous group broke clear, which featured several top teams. Not present in the move, Team Picnic PostNL took up the onus in the chase and committed fully to bring it back. The gap initially stood at 20 seconds, but over the remaining kilometres the team slowly edged into the advantage and coming into the last two kilometres everything was back together. However, the team had to burn through their lead-out due to the efforts in the chase, which meant that fast-finisher Charlotte Kool had to surf the wheels going under the flamme rouge. Finding a gap to open up her sprint, Kool kicked as hard as possible in a long sprint to the line but found one rider, Balsamo, to be just faster come the finish.

Kool said: “We started the race really well and in control as we headed towards the local laps. It’s a shame that we then missed out on the strong break that went clear. That cost us a lot of energy and resources to then shut it down so we had a chance for a result. In the final I had to start my sprint early to bridge towards the front, and in the end I just came a bit short to take second.”

Team Picnic PostNL coach Callum Ferguson added: “I think as a team we actually rode pretty well. A lot of the group improved on things that we wanted to work on from previous weeks which was good and nice to see. Unfortunately, we lost the focus on a bad moment when the dangerous break went, and we had to expend a lot of energy to then bring it back ahead of the finish. In the final, Charlotte did well and came a close second on the day. I think overall we can be generally happy with the day.”