Wiggle Honda Pro Cycling’s Giorgia Bronzini endured the heavy rain of the second stage of the Women’s Tour, between Hinckley, Leicestershire and Bedford, to take sixth place on the line, despite continuing to suffer from the cold that affected her performance on stage one. The former two-time road World Champion was fourth in the bunch sprint, which finished just six seconds behind breakaway duo Rossella Ratto (Estado de Mexico-Faren) and Susanna Zorzi (Astana-Be Pink), as current rainbow jersey Marianne Vos (Rabobank-Liv) took third.
“I feel the same as yesterday,” Bronzini said of her cold. “I don’t enjoy the rain. I hope that the rain of today will go away for the coming stages.
“I don’t know if I put all of my power in the fight for third place,” she added. “It was a technical sprint, in the rain, and I don’t want to take too many risks. Maybe if I was fighting for first position I would have tried harder, but today I didn’t take a risk. It was unnecessary for third place in my opinion.”
Ratto had escaped midway through the 118.5km stage and, despite being brought back to just a few seconds with 35km to go, European Champion Zorzi managed to bridge across to her Italian compatriot and the two of them began to pull away again.
Despite such a slim margin of victory, the stage win was enough for Ratto to take over the race leader’s yellow jersey.
“I’m really, really surprised about the tactics of the other teams” Bronzini said. “There was a moment when we pulled the group and we brought back Ratto to 15 seconds, but the rest of the teams did nothing. It was not our job to catch the break and, in the end, when someone moved to chase the break I sent two girls to get into it, but then the others chased them down.
“I said ‘okay, if you don’t work you’re going to lose the jersey,’ and I was a little bit upset, but we can’t work for the others,” she explained. “My shape isn’t the best and I can’t ask my team to do all that work for me when my shape is not the best when the work is on the shoulders of the others.
“I don’t know why, I was really upset about it, but in the end we can do nothing more. I didn’t want the girls to do any more. I feel good with my teammates; they found me, and they asked me, and the feeling in the team was really good. I hope that in the next days we can be more lucky and maybe they’ll leave us in the breaks! But anyway I’m still looking out for some good results.”
Tomorrow’s third stage will take the peloton to the east coast of England, with a flat, 90.5km course between Felixstowe, Suffolk, and Clacton-On-Sea, Essex.
Result
1. Rosella Ratto (Estado de Mexico-Faren)
2. Susanna Zorzi (Astana-Be Pink)
3. Marianne Vos (Rabobank-Liv)
6. Giorgia Bronzini (Wiggle Honda Pro Cycling)
