In music, they call it the difficult second album. After lighting up the peloton in her first full season racing in Europe, Coryn Rivera faced this challenge in 2018.
Expectations were high for the American; she'd won the Trofeo Alfredo Binda, the Tour of Flanders, a stage of the Tour of California and the RideLondon Classique in her debut year with Team Sunweb before helping the German outfit to the team time trial world title.
While the spring was not the unmitigated success she'd enjoyed the year before, there was plenty to write home about for the 26-year-old in 2018.
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"I think I was a bit too motivated this spring, but I learned to turn that around and continue to fight and be gritty throughout the rest of the year," Rivera told Cyclingnews at last week's Rouleur Classic, where she was presented with the Vox Women rider of the year award.
The major turning point for Rivera came at the end of May, following a slightly disappointing showing at the Tour of California women's race, and carried on through to the end of June. She claimed two stages of the Lotto Thuringen Ladies Tour and finished fourth in the general classification before going on to take another stage win and the overall title at the Women's Tour. It was all capped off with the US national road race title, a result she had come agonisingly close to on several occasions in recent years.
"I think I've grown as a rider," Rivera said. "I've always been known as a bit of a sprinter, and going into the Women's Tour, it was intermediate sprints plus the end-of-the-race sprint, and then going on and defending a jersey and being mindful of time and GC, and who can go up the road and who can't. It was definitely a different kind of mindset to one-day racing. I think I proved that I can do a different kind of cycling."
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via Cyclingnews Latest Interviews and Features http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/rivera-the-difficult-second-album
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