SAFETY IN NUMBERS
How Lizzie Deignan used the strength of Boels- Dolmans to win the Tour de Yorkshire
Lizzie Deignan and her team-mate Anna van der Breggen were virtually inseparable in the second half of April. In Amstel Gold, Flèche Wallonne and Liège, the pair finished one and two, the Dutchwoman first and the Brit second. So when the Boels-Dolmans duo prised themselves clear of a fragile Tour de Yorkshire peloton on the biggest climb of the day, the Côte de Lofthouse, and bridged to the escape, it looked like the party that the team had started in the Ardennes would continue in Yorkshire.
The race then settled into a pattern which was a microcosm of the women’s sport right now: Boels the strongest team, but not quite dominant, as Sunweb and Wiggle-High5, both with numbers in the race, pursued. From that moment, Boels had numerical superiority at the front all the way to the finish. When Deignan and Van der Breggen climbed up from Nidderdale to the windswept Lofthouse Moor, they joined the six riders still at the front, which included their team-mate Amy Pieters. With three Boels riders in the front eight, and the peloton in pieces, they set to work. Pieters drove the front group to a minute’s lead, before Van der Breggen and Deignan drew Cylance’s Dani King clear with 50km to go. The remnants of the front group melted back into a chase group that had taken time to get organised, but crucially, contained two strong sprinters, Coryn Rivera and Giorgia Bronzini. Even more crucially, Rivera had three more Sunweb riders in the group, while Bronzini had two Wiggle-High5 riders at her disposal.
Sunweb and Wiggle slowly ground down the gap between the two groups. At 40km, the gap was 1:40. Five had committed to the chase, with even Rivera and Bronzini taking occasional turns in the rotation. Ahead, Van der Breggen worked mainly alone. Five against one would normally be unfair odds, but the Dutchwoman and Deignan were much stronger, as demonstrated by their ability to drop the others on the climb. 10km later, the gap was down to a minute, and with 15km to go, it was down to 30 seconds.
The catch looked inevitable, but when Deignan attacked and King was unable to respond, the gap, this time between a lone Deignan and the weakening group, started going out again. Suddenly, the pursuit match was between one fresh rider, and a disjointed group of tired survivors. Deignan might have been in front for 50km, but for 35 of those she’d had a Boels rider in front of her, first Pieters, then Van der Breggen. It left her very fresh for her victory parade into Harrogate.