Wow.
Thank you for opening this week’s Wheel Talk Newsletter, the last of the Spring racing season. I will never get over the last two races of the “Classics”, but looking back to Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, we were treated to quite a campaign! Naturally today I will highlight some of my favourite moments. Feel free to drop yours in the comments, but before we relive the moments that made the Spring:
SD Worx-Protime announced on Monday that Lorena Wiebes will remain with the Dutch team through 2028, alongside current World Champion Lotte Kopecky. Not only did the team extend with their top sprinter, but they also inked a lasting deal with both naming sponsors SD Worx and Protime, securing their place in the peloton for the next four years at least.
“We are one of the few top teams in the peloton that focuses entirely on women’s cycling,” said team manager Erwin Janssen. “I think this is also part of our strength. Women’s cycling has been on the rise tremendously in recent years. There is much more attention on the sport. Our main sponsors SD Worx and Protime are also anticipating that growth with us for the coming years.”
Wiebes was already set to stay with the team through the end of next season but jumped the line to extend for another three years indicating the Dutchwoman is happy in her current home. Since joining the team from (then) DSM in 2023 Wiebes has swept up a staggering tally of wins including two stages of the Vuelta a Burgos, a stage of the Giro, a stage of the Tour de France Femmes, two stages of the Tour of Scandinavia, Gent-Wevelgem and two editions of Ronde van Drenthe. Her total UCI win count since joining the team is 18, not including overall competitions, non-UCI races and TTTs.
“I didn’t hesitate for long. I feel completely at home in this team and I also feel that in this environment I can make the necessary steps in the coming years,” Wiebes said of the extension. “It is a big compliment for me that the team wants to work with me as far into the future as 2028. I was offered a nice contract, so we quickly reached an agreement.”
The team also further indicated their dedication to Kopecky as the core of the team. In the press release about Wiebes’s extension, she highlighted the compatibility between the two riders as a reason to stay.
“I get along well with Lotte. In the races, we strengthen each other,” Wiebes said. “How Lotte occasionally pulls the sprint for me is unprecedented. In the classics, I pull up to her. It’s a great prospect that we will still be together in a team for the next four years.”
Speaking of Kopecky…
After one heck of a Spring Kopecky hinted that she will not race the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in August, despite a stage in Belgium. Instead, she is focusing on the Olympic Games in Paris where she will compete on the Track.
“The Omnium ends Sunday afternoon, the Tour starts Monday morning. That is almost unfeasible to do that in a good way,” Danny Stam told the press. “Combining those two events would also be a very difficult task mentally. If you were to take Olympic gold, it’s too short a day to start the next morning in the Tour. She can now fully focus on the Games.”
We can only hope now that Kopecky will get some downtime before she lines up for the Giro d’Italia in July.
Racing continues…
At La Vuelta España Femenina!
The first “Grand Tour” of the year kicks off on Sunday and most of the best riders we saw at the Ardennes will be in attendance. Kasia Niewiadoma, Elisa Longo Borghini, and Demi Vollering are all three expected to line up and Liane Lippert will make her long-awaited return to the peloton.
I will write a full course and rider-to-watch breakdown later this week, along with daily previews of each stage before they happen, but here are the basics of what you can expect.
The Basics
When: Eight stages from Sunday, April 28 to Sunday, May 5
The briefest of stage analysis: 16 km TTT to start, three possible sprint stages (3, 4 and 7), two kind of hilly stages (5 and 2) and two pretty mountainous stages (6 and 8)
Live Coverage: 🇬🇧🇪🇺 Discovery +/Eurosport, 🇺🇸 Peacock, 🇨🇦 FloBikes, 🇦🇺 SBS on Demand (times may vary each day)
Must-watch stages:
There’s a lot to look forward to at La Vuelta Femenina this year, but the bulk of the General Classification battle will likely happen near the end of the week. Both stages 6 and 8 end on a mountain top and the final stage has a second climb thrown in for good measure.
Stage 6: Tarazona to La Laguna Negra Vinuesa (132 km) – Friday, May 3
Stage 8: Distrito Telefónica to Valdesquí. Comunidad de Madrid (89.5 km) – Sunday, May 5
Top contenders:
Kasia Niewiadoma, winner of La Flèche Wallonne last Wednesday, will be back in action in Spain on Sunday aiming for another victory, or perhaps the whole thing. Last year’s runner-up Demi Vollering is also expected to start her hunt for another major GC win in Spain, after narrowly losing out to Annemiek van Vleuten last year.
Lidl-Trek’s duo of Elisa Longo Borghini and Gaia Realini are also expected to line up, Realini is especially exciting as she was third overall last year behind Vollering and Van Vleuten.
One of the most exciting riders on the start line is Movistar’s Liane Lippert who will take over team leadership this year after the retirement of Van Vleuten at the end of last season. Lippert missed the early season due to a foot injury over the offseason, and the German’s presence has been missed at the hillier spring races.
Worth mentioning again: A full breakdown of both the course and the contenders will be available later this week on EscapeCollective.com
Join the Vuelta Femenina Fantasy Competition!
With the Vuelta Femenina kicking off this weekend, it’s time to not only watch one of the coolest races on the planet, but also predict who will win each day …
Fantasy competitions can be complicated, but playing the Escape Fantasy competition couldn’t be easier! All you need to do is select one rider per stage to lead your team. The twist? You can only choose a rider once. We’ll be running a Wheel Talk mini-league, and we’d love to see you in there!
Later this week we’ll be sending out an email with some information about how to play, so if you haven’t already, be sure to sign up to the Wheel Talk newsletter.
Wheel Talk Podcast
This week on the podcast, Gracie and I were joined by Rebecca Charlton. The three of us tried to remain neutral as we talked about La Flèche Wallonne and Liege-Bastogne-Liege, the good the bad and the tactically questionable.
We’re toying with some bonus mini-episodes next week depending on how La Vuelta goes. Raise your hand if you’re keen on extra content!
Let’s Discuss
The top five best moments of the Spring season.
I feel pretty confident saying we’ve just been treated to the best Spring season… ever. Made sweeter by SD Worx’s complete dominance last year, we were all prepared for the star-power-packed team to continue their stranglehold on the races, but the opposite happened.
SD Worx-Protime still won a few races, but a lot of other riders and teams stepped up to the plate and took their chances against the Dutch team. The result was too many fantastic moments to pack into this newsletter, so I’ve narrowed it down to five (and yes, two of them happened last week).
Marianne Vos opens the Spring books with a win
It feels like a lifetime ago, but Vos opening up the Spring Classics season with a win was exactly how we needed the season to start. It was a reminder that the GOAT is still here and she is still at the top of her game, especially after last season and her offseason iliac artery surgery, the world fell into place when the Dutchwoman won Omloop Het Nieuwsblad.
This whole race was fantastic, and looking back it gave us a glimpse at some of the major themes of the Spring to come.
Shirin van Anrooij and Elisa Longo Borghini Tour of Flanders fun
Remember the Tour of Flanders? What a race that was! There were so many highlights, but one of them was the Lidl-Trek duo of Van Anrooij and Longo Borghini. They’d been working off each other all Spring, but really put it all together to go 1-3 at Flanders.
Once again, like a good story, Flanders had some foreshadowing of what was to come…
Lotte Kopecky makes history in the Roubaix Velodrome
Flanders was disappointing for Kopecky and for SD Worx-Protime, but they made up for it a week later at Paris-Roubaix Femmes avec Zwift. In reality, it was only a matter of time until Kopecky won her very own cobble, but that the Dutch team had come apart at the seams a week earlier made the win all the more fantastic.
Kasia Niewiadoma finally gets that W
In October we will be looking back on La Flèche Wallonne as a year highlight, which has probably never happened before. The finish doesn’t lend itself to the most exciting racing, because no matter what teams do it will always end in a sprint uphill to the line. But this year, fan-favourite Niewiadoma’s five-year drought came to an end atop the Mur de Huy, a moment no one will forget any time soon.
Grace Brown comes full circle
What better way to end the Spring than with another surprise winner and another end to a years-long narrative? Brown’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège victory was one with layers. First her history with the race itself, her two second-place finishes in 2020 and 2022. Second, her 2024 season. And finally, her day on Sunday, her near-crash that almost took her out of the running and ultimately her first big WT one-day win.
Behind these five moments, there were a hundred little ones that all added up to make this Spring one to remember, one that might not be topped in the future. But the peloton continues to step it up, more riders are making their way through the ranks and in the years to come we might look back at this Spring as a turning point.
After all, take a glance at the last five WT one-days and you’ll see five different nationalities, with only one Dutch victory. That is WILD.
The joys of social media
Last week I plugged FDJ-Suez’s roster announcements, but this week it’s DSM-Firmenich PostNL’s La Vuelta Femenina announcement that is living in my mind rent-free.
No AI needed for this one when you have Abi Smith on the team! A mega talent on the bike and off!
A picture worth a couple of words
We’re all big fans of Sarah Gigante here. The Tour Down Under winner was probably hoping someone would join her off the front of Liège-Bastogne-Liège but she was destined to spend half the race alone out front.
We also love a gutsy ride and a little foreshadowing. Perhaps her 70 km ITT on Sunday was to prepare for the upcoming Vuelta? We will find out soon.
Taylor Swift does it again
As if last week wasn’t amazing already after Niewiadoma won La Flèche Wallonne, Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album The Tortured Poets Department on Friday. The 31-song, 2+ hour beast of an album isn’t packed with pop bangers like her last release Midnights, instead Swift honed her lyricism and really tapped into her poetic side. She unleashed her anger, her hurt and her most unhinged in songs like But Daddy, I Love Him, So Long, London, loml, and so many more songs.
This album is not for the radio, it’s not for TikTok. Along with her favourite collaborators Jack Antonoff (of Bleachers) and Aaron Dessner (of The National), Swift returned to her folklore woods with a synthesizer and let loose.
In the opening track Fortnight, she called up longtime friend Post Malone to sing the bridge, and I’ll bet you recognize some faces from the music video.
Spoiler for listeners of the Album Files Podcast, but I rate this album a 10/10. I’ll be listening to this for months, years, decades, the rest of my life.
Until next time!
Thank you for reading this edition of the Wheel Talk Newsletter. As always, if you have any questions or any topics you’d like me to dig into, you can find me on Escape’s Discord or on social media @abimickey .
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