Australian track specialist Cure crossed the line just millimetres behind race winner Maria Vittoria Sperotto (BePink Cogeas). Former two-time junior world road race champion, Lucy Garner (Wiggle Hi5) was in third place just behind.
“It was awesome,” Cure told the Eurosport cameras afterwards. “It was quite a hard finish and it didn’t quite go to plan, but it was awesome to get second and third up there.
“We knew that, with coming here with three riders, and with Orica being the one of the most experienced teams out there…we knew that coming with three riders we could leave it up to teams like Orica to chase,” Cure said.
The flat 110km circuit race saw the peloton stay largely together, but a small breakaway managed to escape in the closing kilometres. The gap was never more than a minute, however, and the sprinters’ teams pulled it back in plenty of time for the finish.
“Considering we’re only with three, we really pulled together as a team, so to get second and third… we’re so happy with that,” Garner said.
“It started off pretty steadily, with everybody just getting into it, and then when we made the turn it was quite full on,” she explained. “There were a lot of attacks going, but we were just trying to sit in the wheels and save as much energy as possible.
“We didn’t know how our fitness was going to be coming into this – we’re kind of in our off-season now – but we did what we could, and to get two of us on the podium, we should be happy with that.”
Two-time Australian road champion Gracie Elvin picked up the overall sprint classification victory after help from her Orica-Scott teammates throughout the event, but it was disappointment from teammate Sarah Roy in the final sprint, finishing 16th.
“We planned to do a full lead-out as we knew it would likely come down to a sprint," Roy said. "One rider was away with just 45 seconds with 10 kilometres to go and we used Jess Allen with five kilometres to go to bring it back so we could have a go in the final sprint."
“The plan was for the team to lead me out from the second to last corner, but we just didn’t get there close enough to the front in time,” Roy said.
“I felt awesome today so I am disappointed not to have been able to get into a good position and really go for it." - Sarah Roy
Despite not coming away with a result in the final sprint the team worked well to secure a victory in the intermediate sprint competition throughout the race.
“Georgia Williams did a great job of leading Gracie out for the first sprint prime and then Jess Allen helped out in the second and I led Gracie out for the final one," Roy said.
"She was able to win two of the primes to secure the overall win in this which was great for us to take from today's race, the final UCI race of the season for us.”
