|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Thüringen Rundfarht 2007
WCN quicklink >> Stage 1 Stage 1 Full Stage 2 Stage 2 Full Stage 3 Stage 3 Full Stage 4 Stage 4 Full Stage 5 Stage 6 Stage 7 Stage 7 Full
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
On this page >> Write-up Comments Results General Classification Photos
Stage 3 Greiz - Greiz, 130km
Emma
Pooley (Team Specialised for Women) attacked at 52.6 km of 130km on stage
3 to generate a lone victory into Greiz. The
British rider attacked at each of the mountain competition points in the
hope that she could maintain the grey climber’s jersey. At Doertendorfer,
a14% gradient, she was one
minute ahead. By the time she reached the climb before Walterdorf village
and another 15% climb she had gained four minutes 30 seconds. There was no
reaction from the yellow jersey team of Raleigh Lifeforce Creation. They
seemed to choose not to chase, seemingly happy to let the jersey go. The
main peloton lost further time as they were brought to a complete stop at
a railway crossing causing just over an extra minute’s delay. Two
riders did chase Pooley, Natalie Bates (Team Getränke Hoffmann) and Tanja
Hennes (Bigla Cycling Team) managed to get a couple of minutes ahead of
the peloton, but still almost two minutes from Pooley. They seemed to be
working well together on the climb to Teichwolframsdorf, however Hennes
dropped back into the chasing bunch on the descent back to Greiz. The
peloton had split and the final group containing approximately 20 riders
were left to chase and did not react until the last 30km. The chase was
led in the main by Équipe Nürnberger Versicherung’s Edita Puckinskaite
and Trixi Worrack, followed by T-Mobile’s Oenone Wood and her
team-mates. As Pooley crossed the start finish line to start the final
10km loop, she held a gap of just over 6 minutes to Bates and a further 3
minutes to the peloton. The power of T-Mobile and Équipe Nürnberger
Versicherung worked hard to close the gap. They swallowed up Bates on the
final climb but could not catch Pooley in time. At
the finish, Pooley had a 4 minute 22 second advantage going into stage 4
ahead of T-Mobile’s Oenone Wood, who lies second. Time will tell whether
this will prove too much advantage to take back over the next 3 days. Pooley
had spent three hours alone at the head of the race which meant she
secured not only the yellow jersey, but the mountains, sprint and the most
aggressive jerseys too.
Emma
Pooley (Team
Specialised for Women) was over
the moon, if not a little surprised by her win. "I
wasn’t hanging around to get caught. It was quite windy and very hard but
I wasn’t going that fast. Although I would have never thought that they
would [the
peloton] have let me out there so long today, I think they left it a little too
late to chase", said Pooley. The British rider is not that well
known, she was the Duathlon World Champion in 2004 and rode professionally
last season in the FBUK team before joining Team Specialized for Women this
year. “It
may be difficult to hold the jersey” Pooley added, “we
have a time trial and three more stages to go. My team is a baby team here
so we will try to hold it”. Oenone
Wood (T-Mobile) sprinted
clear to take second on the stage. Asked what had happened today she said, “It was a strange day, there
were a couple of teams whose priority it was to chase today and they
didn’t which was a bit strange. It was left to Nürnberger and T-Mobile to
chase. We didn’t want to give up the tour on day 3 so we had a couple of
our riders at the front to try to bring the break back into a more
reasonable time. We have the time trial which will create gaps of minutes
rather than second between the top riders and then we have three more stages
so anything can happen.” Rochelle
Gilmore (Menikini
Selle Italia Gysko) rode strongly at the finish to secure third place on the
stage. Asked about the race today given the frustrations from some of the
teams about the lack of chase, she said, “I
rode well on the hills and finished strongly. There was a bit of a lull
though in the race, the pace didn’t seem to be that hard. It wasn’t
until the last 30km that people started to attack and the race got going. I
found something in my legs and was in the front group over the last climb.
Oenone [Wood]
attacked with about 1km and managed to put a gap on the bunch. I was
able to go for the sprint and it paid off.” Emma Rickards (Raleigh Lifeforce Creation HB) looked very tired at the end of the race, losing the yellow jersey to Emma Pooley. “It was a tough day, it was a long stage and there was a lot of wind. The final big sprint was too much and I could not hold on”. She commented on the rest of the peloton reactions to the lack of chasing by Raleigh and other teams. ”We didn’t want to hold onto the jersey all week and we left it up to other teams to see if they would have a go. I guess they were looking to us to defend the jersey but we told them that we had no intention of keeping the yellow jersey”. Asked if the rest of the week will be hard for the team given the gap gained by Emma Pooley, Rickards added. “She is a good time trial rider but she doesn’t have a strong team around her. She has been doing a lot on her own so it will be interesting to see what happens”.
Results - Top 10 - click here to see full result
General Classification Top 10 - click here to see full GC
Photos Click on any image to enlarge >>
Want to contact WomensCycling.net? The
WomensCycling.net email address is
To contact the webmaster, the
address is : Type this address into the "To" line of a new email message in your email programme. The WomensCycling.net email address is displayed as a graphic in order to reduce the amount of 'spam' email received from programmes which 'crawl' the internet for sites with addresses displayed in text and then overwhelm that address with junk, or even forge the address in junk messages that they generate and send to others. Sorry for any inconvenience this approach causes you.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright
WomensCycling.net 2004 - 2007 © |
