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Daniek Hengeveld (Ceratizit-WNT) soloed to win stage 1 of the Santos Women Tour Down Under in Aldinga Beach and claimed the race’s first ochre leader’s jersey.
Hengeveld attacked solo inside of 50 kilometres to go and upstaged the sprinters team to secure her first WorldTour victory, crossing the line 36 seconds ahead of the peloton.
A few kilometres after her solo flyer, a counter-attack fizzled quickly as Hengeveld increased her lead kilometre after kilometre as the peloton seemed disinterested in chasing. The 22-year-old Dutch rider kept her head down, pushing the gap to two minutes inside of 30 kilometres to go.
Alarms starting to ring in the peloton and Canyon-SRAM sent Chloé Dygert and Tiffany Cromwell to the front to chase, but without any concerted help from other teams, the peloton was too late to catch the solo rider.
Ally Wollaston (FDJ-SUEZ) took the chaotic field sprint for second place and Kathrin Schweinberger (Human Powered Health) was third.
Hengeveld admitted that her attack was in response to suffering on the lone categorized climb of the day.
“I was actually not even thinking, I was just it’s a new team and we wanted to be aggressive and I was actually struggling on the climb and I was like well, I better just go now because everybody is struggling. So that was my motivation to just go and see how far I go,” Hengeveld said.
“It was still far, and I was alone and I was like, oh, I will see how far I come.”
With the addition of time bonus seconds, Hengeveld tops the general classification with 43 seconds on Wollaston. Schweinberger is a further two seconds back.
Stage 2 should deliver the most decisive of the three days of racing as the peloton tackles…
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