“I don’t think we need to do anything just yet,” Liv-Alula-Jayco sports director Gene Bates speaks into his race radio. There’s just over 30 kilometres to go on the opening stage of the women’s Tour Down Under and the race situation is this: Daniek Hengeveld of Ceratzit-WNT rides solo under the sun which beats down on the rolling Adelaide hills. There’s a peloton two minutes behind her filled with some of the best sprinters in the current women’s WorldTour and teams like Liv-Alula-Jayco, FDJ-Suez, AG Insurance-Soudal and Canyon//SRAM-Zondacrypto (among others) all have sprinters in their mix who should be in a shot of a stage win on the flat run into Snapper Point. Should is the operative word, however. As Hengeveld is proving, there are no guarantees in cycling.
Bates is playing the game with his Australian squad, and other teams aren’t yet taking his bait. It’s a stalemate. Who has the responsibility to chase Hengeveld down? Is it the home favourites of Liv-Alula-Jayco? Is it FDJ-Suez with double-Olympic medalist Ally Wollaston in their ranks? Is it Canyon//SRAM-Zondacrypto who have a flying Chloe Dygert to protect? The question is, who can hold their nerve for long enough? Which team will panic first? The bunch spreads across the wide roads and slows down, they look at each other and wait.
Capitalising off the poker behind is, of course, Hengeveld, whose gap continues to grow. An established time trialist known for her attacking style, she has her head down and is focused on the road ahead. The kilometres tick away and the gap holds strong. Slowly teams begin to sense the danger behind, first Canyon then FDJ, then Bates sends a Liv rider to the front of the peloton too. They start to ride but it’s too little, too late. Hengeveld powers to the finish line and still has almost a minute on the bunch by the time she gets there. She celebrates and secures the biggest win of her career, and the others are left to fight for scraps behind. They should have caught her. A peloton should have been stronger than one rider on flat roads with a tailwind, but too many teams got it wrong. Hengeveld, on the other hand, played a blinder.
“The biggest thing was a lack of cohesion and commitment. We made a huge mistake in giving the break a bit too much time and we underestimated them,” a dejected Wollaston said at the finish after winning the bunch kick and finishing second on the day.
“We also just came in unprepared for that scenario on the stage. We heard a lot of media assuming today would be a bunch sprint and we didn’t properly take into account the possibility of a breakaway and what to do in that scenario and which teammate to commit to that chase.”
Anya Louw of AG Insurance-Soudal, who was working for her sprinter Alexandra Manly on stage one, told a similar tale to Wollaston: “Canyon//SRAM were pulling for a while and a few other teams helped a little bit, but I think we hugely underestimated the break. Once they were in sight I think everybody tried to let them dangle out there a bit and the gap went out again, which was a huge mistake,” Louw admitted after the race. “It was a little bit negative and I think a big one was we just miscalculated and waited too long to get the break back.”
Hengeveld, understandably, was elated after the race. She’d outsmarted a bunch of the best bike riders in the world. They didn’t think that this stage could be one for an opportunistic solo winner, but the Dutch rider had a plan, and she stuck to it.
“I was not even thinking [when I attacked]. This is a new team, we wanted to be aggressive, I was struggling on the climb but everyone was struggling so that was my motivation to go and see how far I could make it,” Hengeveld commented after her victory. “In the last one kilometre I thought I would make it, I didn’t look back at all until kilometre two or three. I heard my sports director in my ear telling me to come on and I thought f*ck, maybe they are getting close but they weren’t. It’s really nice, I appreciated that they were still cheering me on and that gave me extra watts.”
The 22-year-old has had a turbulent couple of years, suffering crashes and injuries while part of her former team, Team dsm-firmenich-PostNL. After the stage, she spoke of how much her first WorldTour win meant to her: “It was a long way and I was alone. This is my first race back after my crash last year with a new team, I lost some confidence over the last two years and I was finally racing like I was 18 again. I felt like I remembered why I raced, and that was really nice.”
If there’s one thing to learn from Hengeveld’s performance today, it’s to expect the unexpected from the women’s peloton this season. Fortune can often favour the brave, and there’s riders who have worked hard this winter with have the physical ability to shatter dreams of sprint teams. The likes of Liv-Alula-Jayco, Canyon//SRAM and FDJ-Suez may have tried to play the game, but as Hengeveld has proven, the game has changed.
