La Route de France stage 2-4 recap
La Route de France is women’s cycling’s response to the Tour de France. While every professional North American race includes a women’s division on the same route, most of the major European races do not, including the Tour, the biggest cycling race in the world. Because of this La Route de France is one of the only professional races in the world exclusive to women. As of stage four, Annemiek Van Vleuten wears the overall leader’s jersey, one second ahead of Judith Arndt, the stage winner.
"It was a good race for me," said Arndt. "I felt good the whole way. The roads are dead here so maybe it helped that I've been training in Australia on similar roads, but overall it was a really nice course. A little bit windy and a few smaller hills.”
The six-stage race opened with a 5.9km prologue on 8 August won by Sarah Düster of the Cervélo TestTeam, narrowly ahead of van Vleuten. Arndt finished the prologue in fourth, nine seconds behind the leader and two seconds behind Olga Zabelinskaya. Van Vleuten took control of the leader’s jersey in stage one, which was won by Ina Yoko Teutenberg.
Thursday was host to stage four, a 24.3km time-trial won by Arndt, for HTC-Columbia. She finished 15 seconds ahead of Tatiana Antoshina and 17 ahead of Zabelinskaia, the third place overall. Van Vleuten finished in ninth, 38 seconds behind Düster, who moved into second place overall.
"However I'm still one second behind on Annemiek and she is riding well and can sprint really well,” said Arndt. “The next two stages are harder than the previous stages which is good. We'll have to sit down tonight and come up with a plan of how to take GC. I will try everything for sure, but it's not going to be easy."
Van Vleuten had held the overall lead for two stages before taking any stage wins. She had finished the 129km stage two in third place, behind teammate Marianne Vos and the stage one winner Teutenberg, riding for HTC-Columbia. The overall leader went on to win the Route’s 115.8km third stage and extended her gap over Düster, who was in second overall before Arndt, who finished stage three in fourth, jumped ahead with her victory in the time-trial of stage four.
The time-trial saw Düster drop to seventh overall, 1:05 behind, and Teutenberg fell to 22nd, 5:29 behind. Vos, who fell from second to 15th in stage three, climbed up to 11th in the time-trial, 3:09 behind.
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