Spectators will be treated to one of the most anticipated days at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift when the world-class cyclists barrel across the gravel roads of the Champagne region on stage 4 into Bar-Sur-Aube on Wednesday.
It will undoubtedly provide a dramatic backdrop for the race, excitement for the spectators to watch at the side of the road and on the live broadcast, but the top riders in the peloton have conflicting views on whether gravel – or cobbles for that matter – should be included in a high-profile stage race like the Tour de France.
Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar) is a key favourite for the overall title and a self-professed lover of gravel races like Strade Bianche, which she has won twice. Still she feels that there is a time and a place for gravel and that time and place isn’t stage races.
“I don’t look forward to the gravel day to be honest. In my opinion, I love it in Strade Bianche but I don’t like it so much if you have GC ambitions,” Van Vleuten said.
“It’s a bit unnecessary that it can be decided by bad luck and that’s not what I look forward to. But I always have this thing of ‘don’t think about bad luck, then it’s not happening’.”
Van Vleuten has been vocal about her distaste for gravel in stage races before, most notably at the Giro Donne in 2020, where she was forced to run up Seggiano gravel climb on stage 2 into Arcidosso. She won the stage and the overall title that year.
The route planned for stage 4 at the Tour de France Femmes includes a total of 12.9km of gravel, far less gravel than Strade Bianche’s 31.4 kilometres of gravel.
The race heads out of Troyes and into the Parc Naturel de la Forêt d’Orient and over the Lac d’Orient before travelling south toward the one and only intermediate sprint at Bar-our-Seine (60.4km).
It is at the midway point of the race that the peloton will meet the gravel and climbing where we can expect to see attacks and separations in the field.
There are four gravel sectors – Chemin blanc de Celles (2.3km), Chemin blanc des Hautes Forêts (3.2km), Chemin blanc du Plateau (4.4km) and Chemin blanc de Vitry (3km).
Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM) told Cyclingnews that the gravel sectors add another variable that plays into team strengths, tactics and fortune. She said that she revels in the gravel stage.
“To be honest, from let’s say VeloViewer or just having done online research, I would say that it wasn’t…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…