Brendan Johnston (Giant Australia) and Courtney Sherwell are the first two entries in a new chapter of Melbourne to Warrnambool cycling history, delivering the fastest finishing times in the elite men’s and elite women’s categories of Australia’s newest gravel event, the 246km Dirty Warrny.
Johnston, the 2020 winner of the Melbourne to Warrnambool road race and reigning Australian gravel champion, took victory with a time of 7:20:27 after distancing his companions in a leading trio as he came toward the line. Curtis Dowdell (Butterfields) came second and Mark O’Brien (InForm TMX Make) third.
Johnston, Dowdell and O’Brien had set themselves up for the podium positions when they caught and overhauled Jensen Plowright (Groupama-FDJ Continental) and Jack Aitken (Pana Organic x Pedla), who had struck out in the early kilometres of racing and held out the front beyond the final feed zone at 164km into the racing.
There was no close finish in the elite women’s category for Sherwell, who had carved out a ten-minute gap on her nearest rival Kate Kellett by the top of the Norman Track climb at 77km into the event. By the time she reached the finish line on the Warrnambool foreshore, 8:32:13 after setting out from the Mt Duneed Estate near Geelong, her gap to second-finisher Kellett had extended to nearly 40 minutes. Lisa Jacob came third, a further nine minutes back.
Sherwell is no stranger to gravel racing, or for that matter, the Melbourne to Warrnambool, having ridden the National Road Series Women’s Warrnambool Cycling Classic earlier this year.
Still, the Dirty Warrny was a completely different experience to the 155.7km race on the road and also to most Australian gravel races which usually hover around 100km long. Sherwell had never ridden as far as 246km before or spent as long on the bike.
“I didn’t know how my body was going to react, how I was going to cope, whether or not the nutrition plan I had was going to be efficient,” Sherwell told Cyclingnews after the win. “It was just a lot of unknowns because I’ve never done it before, which also made it quite exciting.”
It was, however, when the 34-year-old was in known territory during that first 100km that her difficult patch came, as after the QOM point on Norton track it still took a while before the relief of a true descent kicked in.
The impact was perhaps felt even more because she had not only gone out hard to try and hold firm in a large group of elite men after the mass start but also…
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