A year ago, Emma Norsgaard (Movistar Team) crashed out of the Tour de France Femmes on stage 5. She then worked hard through the off-season to turn herself from a sprinter with an excellent time trial into a classics rider. Her 2023 season started promising until she fractured her collarbone in the Strade Bianche, cutting short the classics campaign she had set her sights on.
At the 2023 Tour de France Femmes, she finally completed her turnaround by going into the breakaway, pushing on with her two companions Agnieszka Skalniak-Sójka (Canyon-SRAM) and Sandra Alonso (Ceratizit-WNT) when the chasing peloton crept ever closer in the final of the race and continuing on with Skalniak-Sójka when Alonso could no longer keep up on the last five kilometres before sprinting out of the Polish rider’s wheel with a whopping 600 metres to go, holding off the surging sprinters by only one second.
At the stage sign-in, Norsgaard had said in several interviews that the team tactics involved her going into the breakaway with the goal of winning the stage, but at that point she did not contemplate actually pulling off such a coup.
“I truly meant it when I said I was going into the breakaway, but I was not expecting this. It’s not every day that I just say, today I want to win, and then it happens. It is kind of amazing when the plan just is a success. To win a stage one year after crashing out of the Tour … I’m just truly, truly happy and I cannot thank the team enough for believing in me and really giving me the support,” the 24-year-old Dane said at the winner’s press conference.
Her sports directors Jorge Sanz and Jurgen Roelandts had come up with the plan to win the stage overnight, and Norsgaard was anything but amused when it was presented to her on the morning of the stage after a tropical night in Southern France when the team hotel’s air-condition broke down.
“I woke up this morning thinking, ‘oh no, another day, another day I have to work, another day I have to suffer’. And I was in such a bad mood. I needed three cups of coffee before anyone could speak to me. And then my DS came up with this plan that I needed to go in the breakaway, and I was like, ‘are you kidding me?’ Before the stage I was like, ‘come on, man’, but I love him now,” said Norsgaard.
Although defending Annemiek van Vleuten’s 2022 Tour de France Femmes victory is the undisputed main goal for the Movistar Team, it is not the be-all and end-all. This was proven when…
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