2nd April – Dwars door Vlaanderen – A travers la Flandre WE: Waregem – Waregem
Team Picnic PostNL’s Women’s program took on Dwars door Vlaanderen on Wednesday, fielding a young squad which aimed to get experience of racing over the cobbles and in hectic races. From the start things were nervous and no break was able to form out front. Instead it became a race of attrition with the peloton slowly reducing in seize, either due to the parcours, splits in the wind, or unfortunate crashes.
Coming into the last 50 kilometres Josie Nelson and Mara Roldan remained in the drastically reduced peloton before things split once more over one of the many cobbled sections. Fighting hard, Roldan made it into the group of around 25 riders but just had to let go on one of the final cobbled sections. Riding all the way to the line in her group, Roldan led the team home in Waregem.
Roldan said: “With strong winds and a very competitive start list we knew we had to be sharp right from the start. I think we can be really happy with how we positioned in the first bit of the race, even with a rather young team here we fought together to stay near the front and ride aggressively when needed. Unfortunately, it got chaotic when we headed towards the first climb and some of the girls got unlucky with crashes, things split on the climbs and the wind made it really hard for them to come back. Josie and I did our best staying near the front, but things kept splitting on the climbs and unfortunately we ended up in different groups. My radio also was not working so it was impossible to communicate back to the car. I did my best floating in the front group until we hit the really hard cobbled climbs. I was a bit frustrated to not be able to talk back to the car, as with my lack of experience I found myself not really knowing what to do, but Albert guided me well nonetheless and it was nice to have him in my ear until the finish. There’s a lot of positive takeaways from today’ especially from a teamwork perspective. It’s great learning as always and a really nice warm up for Flanders on Sunday!”
