STRADE BIANCHE
09.03.19
1The Palio di Siena is a chaotic booze-up-cum-horse race held twice a year in Siena’s Piazza del Campo, which features 10 horses, representing 10 of the 17 districts of the city, skidding and galloping three laps of the dusty track. The Piazza del Campo isn’t huge: the Palio is usually over in 90 harum-scarum seconds. You could argue that the 2019 women’s Strade Bianche, which shares its finishing location with the Palio, was over in even less time than that. Annemiek van Vleuten attacked on the final gravel section of the race, midway up the punchy climb to Le Tolfe. In the 75 seconds it took her to reach the top, she’d built an unassailable lead. Marianne Vos and Kasia Niewiadoma tried to follow, but were forced to relent, and the also-rans coalesced into a 10-rider group whose resignation and weary grind to the finish was diametrically opposed to the energy and vigour of il Palio.
Van Vleuten didn’t hold the tactical advantage in those final 12 kilometres. She had no team-mates to disrupt the chase, while Boels-Dolmans had three riders – Anna van der Breggen, Chantal Blaak and Annika Langvad – and CCC had two – Vos and Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio. There were motivation and numbers in the group, but the stubbornness of the gap between Van Vleuten and the chasers was a tangible indication that the Mitchelton rider was simply stronger than everybody else. On the line she was over half a minute clear of Langvad, best of the rest, with Niewiadoma third.
Strade Bianche answered any questions that might have been lingering around Van Vleuten’s knee, a shard of which had been chipped off in a crash in the World Championships road race in September 2018. The Dutchwoman had spent the entirety of October in a leg brace which prevented her even bending her knee. It had taken just four months for her to get to a point at which she could make a group of the very best female riders in the world bend to her will.