Van der Breggen doubles up with road-race title win
Anna van der Breggen soloed her way to a second career rainbow jersey in the women’s road race yesterday at the UCI Road World Championships in Imola, as a Dutch rider won for a fourth year-in-a-row.
Van der Breggen, who also took gold in Thursday’s time trial, becomes only the second woman to double-up with the road-race and timetrial titles in the same World Championships following France’s Jeannie Longo in 1995. “It’s incredible,” van der Breggen said. “I must say it was a really hard race, we were fighting from the beginning and the climbs were really tough. In the fourth lap I felt strong, we discussed trying to make the race really hard and we did.
“I just went for it. In the last lap everyone was tired and it was difficult to make the difference. I felt good and I went for it but it was really far.”
It was a Dutch onetwo as last year’s world champion Annemiek van Vleuten, riding with a broken wrist after a crash at the Giro Rosa last week, beat Italy’s Elisa Longo Borghini in a sprint to the line for silver, while Great Britain’s Lizzie Deignan came home sixth in a chasing pack.
Two years ago, van der Breggen won gold at the Innsbruck Worlds by going solo with 39km to go. This time she timed it a little earlier, attacking from a reduced group with 42km of the 143km route remaining.
“I didn’t think about that,” she added. “The race and the circuit were really different to Innsbruck. There were some flat parts but it was difficult all the time. I’m really happy. I never expected this. I expected a hard race but it’s incredible.” The 30-year-old quickly rode away from an already select group of five other riders which included van Vleuten as well as Deignan.
But they could not close the gap as the peloton bore down on them, and van der Breggen began the final 28.8km lap of the circuit around Imola with a lead of over a minute. Deignan said. “It was really difficult course, a bit hillier than I would have liked, and I think as a team we came away with the best result we could have done.”