Despite a poor start 22-year-old Thalita de Jong (Netherlands) bounced back and captured the world title in the women’s category on Saturday afternoon. De Jong won ahead of Caroline Mani (France) and pre-race favourite Sanne Cant (Belgium).
“After [messing up] my start I thought to myself ‘OK, this was it. Just try to make a nice race from it and get a decent result’,” De Jong said. That decent result was the first place at the 2016 UCI Cyclo-cross World championships in Heusden-Zolder, Belgium.
De Jong follows in the footstep of Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, who won the Tábor 2015 Cyclo-cross World Championship. The six editions before Tábor were won by De Jong’s compatriot Marianne Vos. Vos is also the Rabo Liv teammate of De Jong. She opted to skip the cyclo-cross season in order to recover fully from earlier injuries.
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In contrast to the previous two races on Saturday, the weather briefly improved ahead of the start of the women’s race. Ellen Van Loy (Belgium) stated before the race that she was ill but still she was able to take the best start and lead out the 42 other riders into the first muddy stretches around the former F1 car racing track. Van Loy was marked by Helen Wyman (Kona Factory Team), Cant, Sophie de Boer (Netherlands), Sabrina Stultiens (Netherlands), Nikki Harris (Great-Britain), Katie Compton (USA) and Kaitlin Antonneau (USA).
In one of the first corners US-champion Compton slipped away, causing her to lose a lot of positions. A few spots further back De Jong was struggling too. She lost about five spots when she got stuck into the car racing circuit gravel trap. A few moments later the future winner lost even more time, briefly riding outside the top-20. During the second half of the course De Jong made up ground. When hitting the second lap she went full speed on the long asphalted finishing straight in eleventh position at 21 seconds from the leaders, flying by compatriot Sanne van Paassen (Netherlands), who was riding her last World Championship race. At that time those leaders were Cant, De Boer, Harris and Mani.
“Once again I [messed up] my start dearly despite a second-row start position. I wasn’t able to keep up or something and suddenly it got quite a bit smaller. Then I started a long chasing race which is quite often what I have to do,” De Jong told Sporza shortly after her big win.
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