Marta Cavalli (FDJ-SUEZ) started the 2022 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift as one of the favourites after a stellar season but her ambitions were brutally cut short when she crashed out of the race on stage and it seriously disrupted her season.Now, Cavalli returns to the Tour de France Femmes as one of seven riders in a strong FDJ-SUEZ line-up.
In an exclusive interview with Cyclingnews, she opened up about the crash that took her out of last year’s Tour and troubled her for months afterwards, stopping her from getting the same results as in her break-out 2022 season when she won the Amstel Gold Race, Flèche Wallonne, Mont Ventoux Dénivelé Challenge and finished runner-up in the Giro d’Italia Donne.
“It was a hard crash. I was lucky because the injury wasn’t so bad in the end, but it took a couple of weeks to understand and see how I feel. The recovery was really slow after the concussion, and I had to build a lot of confidence again,” Cavalli explained.
“From that moment we were working really hard to come back to the highest level. Now I can say that I’m really close, and I’m really happy to be back, but at the same time, there are many small things that we must improve because the level is really high now.”
In the crash, the now-25-year-old Italian sustained head and lower body trauma including a concussion. She returned to racing in October 2022, just before the end of the season, and Cavalli’s early 2023 season were stop-and-go, taking a break after the UAE Tour and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad before racing the Trofeo Binda, then returning for the hilly classics in mid-April where she had been so successful the year before.
“Now we are waiting for the results to be able to say, here I am, back at my best level, at the highest level of women’s cycling,” she said.
“In the beginning it was up and down, during the winter we worked really hard and thought everything looked okay. My shape was growing step by step in two training camps with the team, and everything looked good. But then when I went back to racing I kind of hit a wall. All these months without big races or big efforts, I think I paid for that a little bit. My level was very low.”
In the UAE Tour, Cavalli lost 31 seconds in the echelons on stage 2, and it began even worse on stage 3 where she started the Jebel Hafeet finishing climb more than two minutes down.
The team confirmed at the time that Cavalli was still suffering from the aftereffects of the…
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