In difficult conditions, the Belgian Lotte Kopecky showed remarkable composure to retain her title of cycling world champion on Saturday in Zurich and further frustrate the Dutch Demi Vollering.
Teammates but also rivals all year round in the SD Worx team, the two champions led a contested race in the cold and downpours where in the end it was the smartest who won.
While Vollering was arguably the strongest, she paid for both a sometimes incomprehensible team strategy and her own near-obsessive flurry of effort to outrun Kopecky.
The Belgian was sometimes let go, as during the last ascent of Witikon on the final circuit in and around Zurich. But she kept her nerve and demonstrated remarkable tactical sense to come back and win in a six-man sprint ahead of American Chloé Dygert and Italian Elisa Longo Borghini, while Vollering finished only fifth.
“It was raining, it was cold. Three laps from the end I was freezing, but I tried to stay calm. When Demi attacked on the long climb, I struggled but I got back to my rhythm “You had to keep your cool and use your energy at the right time,” said the now double world champion.
His analysis summed up the failure and enormous frustration of Vollering, who has already lost the Tour de France by just four seconds this summer against the Polish Kasia Niewiadoma, who was out of the running on Saturday.
In the end, the Netherlands, the most successful nation at the Worlds, placed four runners in the first thirteen, but without a single medal at the end, Vollering herself taking charge of burying the hopes of her compatriot Marianne Vos.
– France unable to weigh –
“I’m very disappointed that I didn’t manage to finish the job for the team. The last part wasn’t difficult enough for me, I should have left earlier but it’s easy to say afterwards,” commented the Dutch woman who chattered her teeth and trembled in all her limbs upon arrival.
With this fourteenth success of the season, Kopecky crowns a magnificent year during which she also won the Strade Bianche, Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de Romandie.
At the finish, the 28-year-old Flemish woman first wanted to offer her condolences to the family of Muriel Furrer, the young 18-year-old Swiss runner who died after a fall in the junior race on Thursday.
“Seeing the Swiss runners cry during the minute of silence at the start is not something you want to see. It’s a very difficult moment for them too,” she said.
The big return to the road of Frenchwoman Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, eagerly awaited ten years after her world title, was cut short. Quickly left behind, the Olympic mountain bike champion in Paris dismounted around fifty kilometers from the goal.
The French team, very ambitious at the start, as a whole endured the race, unable to influence events.
Juliette Labous, 12th, finished first Frenchwoman, three minutes exactly behind Kopecky.
“It was really hard,” she said. “I felt pretty good but I made a few extra efforts. I missed a little bit. I don’t have too many regrets but I’m still disappointed not to have hung the front.”
jk/bvo
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