Marta Lach (Ceratizit-WNT) won stage 2 of the Tour of Chongming Island in a mass sprint, with stage 1 winner Mylène de Zoete and Kathrin Schweinberger completing a 1-2-3 for the team.
Alba Teruel (Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi) finished just behind Schweinberger in fourth place.
How it unfolded
Sofie van Rooijen (VolkerWessels) won the first intermediate sprint ahead of Lach and Hanna Tserakh (BTC City Ljubljana Zhiraf Ambedo), and the second intermediate sprint was taken by Dronova who had attacked a bit earlier and gone solo. Scarlett Souren (VolkerWessels) won the sprint for second ahead of Schweinberger.
At 46km from the finish, Dronova was 16 seconds ahead, then Zhao bridged across the gap. Dronova let the Chinese rider take the front and then sat on her wheel, refusing to take a turn and both were caught with 39.5km to go.
Zhang attacked less than a kilometre later and quickly built a sizable gap. Her teammate Lu Siying went after her but never made it to the front, hovering around 20 seconds behind Zhang while the peloton was up to 38 seconds behind. When Lu was reeled in 26km from the finish, the counterattacks that followed lifted the speed of the peloton, and Zhang was also caught with 23km to go.
Nerlo counterattacked right away and quickly had a 20-second lead, with Ceratizit-WNT and VolkerWessels organising the chase. 15km from the line, Nerlo was 48 seconds up on the peloton before her advantage came down again as the sprinters’ teams went all-out to reel…
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