The Ladies Tour of Qatar can sometimes seem a simple race. Ninety riders compete in the desert for three hours and at the end, Kirsten Wild (Hitec Products) always wins the sprint.
That’s not strictly true, of course, but there was certainly a familiar ring to the opening stage of the 2016 event as Wild overpowered Annalisa Cucinotta (Alé-Cipollini) and Lizzie Williams (Orica-AIS) in the finishing sprint at Qatar University to claim the first gold jersey of the race.
Wild’s running tally of stage wins in Qatar over the years now stands at 10 out of a possible 18. Only once has she failed to finish a stage in the top six (for the record, she was 19th on the opening stage in 2010) and Wild has, of course, claimed overall victory on four occasions.
ADVERTISEMENT
“It’s not easy. Maybe it looks easy but it’s really hard racing. My heart rate was over 200 bpm in the sprint,” Wild insisted after descending from the podium on Tuesday. “My team helped me really and that makes it easier of course.”
Wild’s victory places her back in the gold jersey of race leader and will also serve, she hopes, as something of an augury for October’s World Championship road race in Qatar, given that Tuesday’s stage doubled as the Worlds test event.
The peloton tackled the initial loop of 80 kilometres of desert roads that will feature on the Worlds course, and then raced one lap of the 15-kilometre finishing circuit on the artificial island of the Pearl, before coming back off the course for the final seven-kilometre run-in to the finish.
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest Race Results http://ift.tt/1PUdLXA
No comments:
Post a Comment