Photo Credit: Tour du Rwanda
Development Team Picnic PostNL secured their first win of the season on Tuesday, after a brilliant team performance set-up Jurgen Zomermaand to finish it off with first place; while Matteo Vanhuffel put the proverbial cherry on the cake with third.
Faced with over 3000 metres of elevation throughout the third day of racing at the Tour du Rwanda, most of which took place at altitude, Development Team Picnic PostNL hatched a plan to set-up Jurgen Zomermaand and Matteo Vanhuffel to attack the finale. Some strong early work by Christiaan van Rees and Thom van der Werff helped to keep the early break in check while looking after the climbers, before Jacob Bush took over once the peloton thinned drastically down. On the last main climb of the day the head of the race had been whittled down to around 15 riders, including the Development Team Picnic PostNL duo.
Riding with vigour combined with a good tactical mindset, Vanhuffel and Zomermaand kept rolling attacks at the front, with Zomermaand ultimately snapping the elastic inside ten kilometres to go. A fast descent followed, before the young Dutchman dug-deep on the last three kilometre drag to the finish, pushing all the way to take a memorable first professional win. Highlighting Team Picnic PostNL’s Development program talent pipeline, the team weren’t done there with Vanhuffel showing a good turn of speed to make it a double podium for the squad on third place. The result means that the GC has been shaken up too with the team now occupying the same positions in the overall rankings with Zomermaand and Vanhuffel ahead of Wednesday’s fourth out of eight stages.
