GIRO D’ITALIA FEMMINILE
5- 1 4 .07.19
3Perhaps the gods of fate were trying to throw a bone to Van Vleuten’s rivals when landslides meant that the fearsome Passo di Gavia, the intended finish of stage 5 of the Giro Femminile, was pulled and replaced by a route which finished at the top of the Passo Fraele, at Lago di Cancano. The Gavia, after all, is one of the hardest climbs in cycling, and it was hard to see how Van Vleuten’s rivals intended to match her on it.
The Fraele is seven and a half kilometres long; the Gavia from the town of Bormio is 25km long, and there’s a fair bit of climbing before that. Nevertheless, Van Vleuten’s attack at the bottom of the new finishing climb gained her an astonishing 2:57 on the group of eight who were next on the road. Had she had the Gavia at her disposal, the gap might have been bigger.
Van Vleuten had been forced to bide her time until stage 5. Her Mitchelton-Scott team ceded 53 seconds to Canyon-Sram in the opening-day team time trial, and then Marianne Vos busied herself winning the next two stages, as Canyon’s Niewiadoma kept the leader’s jersey warm. But then came Van Vleuten’s killer blow, and she underlined her absolute superiority with a victory by almost a minute in the stage 6 uphill time trial to Teglio. With a lead of over four minutes, Van Vleuten’s work was mostly done – Vos took another two stage wins and eventual runner-up Van der Breggen took a consolation win on the summit finish at Chiusaforte, but even here Van Vleuten gained more time.
At the end of the race, Van der Breggen’s deficit was 3:45, and third-placed Amanda Spratt was at 6:55, while Van Vleuten also won the points and mountains jerseys. It was her second win in the race and the seventh Dutch win in nine years.