Newly-crowned elite women’s UCI Cyclo-cross World Champion Lucinda Brand captured a second rainbow stripes jersey and this time in front of a home crowd in the Netherlands on Saturday, but it was not without drama. The Dutch rider crashed while in a clear lead allowing rival Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado back to her wheel.
“It was OK. It was more that I had to stay calm,” Brand said. “To see a little bit how Ceylin [del Carmen Alvarado] was riding and to see when and how to put the pressure on again. I knew also that if she can come back in a race, she’s really hard to drop off again, especially on explosive course like this.
“In the end I was just a bit strong, which helped me to push hard for a full lap. My strength is that the whole race is hard, not when it’s on and off the whole time.”
Talking about her first attack on the third lap, Brand added, “I wanted to see what would happen if I could ride on the front. Puck [Pieterse] crashed quite hard and it changed the race straight away.
“I had a good flow, a bit too good and I started to pedal a bit too early on some points which caused me to crash. I was a bit mad with myself. That gave Ceylin the opportunity to come back for free, but the race was hard enough to be able to drop her again.”
“I think I’m quite good in just focusing on that little thing that I’m doing at the that right moment,” she said. “So I’m not really distraught from the things that happen around me.
“Sometimes it’s a weakness, of course, in life to move on all the time and not to think too much about what happened, but in this case, I think it’s a strength for me. So I took it with two hands.”
Brand’s…
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