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Road cycling is a sport with plenty of rules, but also unwritten codes of conduct and team strategy that dictate as much, if not more, of what happens out on the road than the black and white on paper dictums.
This was shown clearly in one incident at the end of the women’s Strade Bianche, which prompted recriminations between the teammates who went 1-2 for SD Worx, Demi Vollering and Lotte Kopecky.
Vollering had been the more attacking rider during the race and was on her way over to solo leader Kristen Faulkner (Jayco-AlUla) when Kopecky bridged across to join her with 11 kilometres to go. That can prove a questionable move if you drag another rider over with you, but in this case, Kopecky got a clean gap and was able to join up with Vollering and cooperate with her to prevent Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig (FDJ-Suez) from catching up and also eat into Faulkner’s advantage.
The pair worked well in that aim, but it almost seemed like they delayed the catch. What had been over a minute gap when Kopecky joined Vollering was down to 14 seconds with 5.8 kilometres to go, with Faulkner tiring. It was probably at this point that the SD-Worx pair began thinking about who would take the win as they didn’t take more than a few seconds from Faulkner's advantage before the final climb into Siena in the final kilometre.
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SD Worx team director Anna van der Breggen said after the race that there weren’t any instructions given to who should take the victory, that the main directive was catching Faulkner. In the absence of clear directions, most riders would fall back on the norms of cycling.
If it were a stage race, you’d probably have the general classification rider take the win to secure the bonus seconds. We saw this at the women’s UAE Tour Stage 3, where Elisa Longo Borghini took out the win ahead of young climbing domestique Gaia Realini because of Borghini being the chosen GC rider with a slightly better position on the overall.
On other occasions, you’ll let the less decorated rider take the win, a good recent example of this was with Jumbo-Visma’s 1-2-3 at the 2022 Paris-Nice Stage 1, when Primoz Roglič and Wout van Aert, two of the most credentialled riders of the current generation allowed Christophe Laporte to cross the line first to take the victory.
Other times it’s the rider who’s done the most work during the race that gets the prize. Another case involving Realini at the recent Trofeo Oro saw Amanda Spratt let her teammate finish ahead in the Trek-Segafredo 1-2 after Realini had been in the domestique role, working hard again.
It can even come down to scissors-paper-rock, at least as a joke, as Tadej Pogačar (rock) and Rafal Majka (paper) demonstrated at the 2022 Tour of Slovenia, though that appeared to be good humour for the cameras from the dominant UAE Team Emirates pair at that particular race.
Perhaps the only good race among teammates situation I can think of was the 2017 Australian National Road Race between Amanda Spratt and Katrin Garfoot (both Orica-Scott), when they were free up the road for about 50 kilometres and had plenty of time to come to terms with the fact they'd be taking each other on for the win without compromising the rest of the race or future plans. It ended in a sprint for the line with Garfoot taking it out over Spratt, with both pretty happy with the manner of deciding things post-race.
Generally, a decision is made by team management or the two riders beforehand, but that clearly hadn’t happened in the case of SD Worx at the Strade Bianche, or it had been miscommunicated. The pair crested the climb well ahead of Faulkner with just the downhill to the Piazza del Campo finish remaining.
Vollering was riding in front, but not pushing it too hard, and not checking behind her for an attack from Kopecky, which is what you would expect from two riders contesting the finish. Instead, she had to react rapidly when Kopecky swooped past her to take the final corner first, the same tactic that saw her win last year’s race ahead of Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar).
This year, it was Vollering who triumphed by mere centimetres on the throw to the line, with Dutch watchers at the finish apparently privy to a particularly heated insult thrown towards Kopecky. After the line, there was no immediate congratulations between the pair, and until the result came in a few minutes later which prompted a hug for the cameras, there was an iciness between the pair who took the 1-2, normally a moment for joyous show after the display of force and teamwork.
Describing the finale of the race, Vollering said that she was ready to take Kopecky’s hand and cross the finish line together when the Belgian went past her.
“Lotte is a killer, yeah… I was like, ‘is she just doing lead-out for me?’,” said Vollering, “and then I felt she was really going for it, ‘okay, now we are not teammates anymore, and now we just go full for it’. In the end, it’s the team that won, and we always say: if it is a victory for the team, then it’s good, so this was doubly good.
“Lotte always really goes for everything, that’s something that I like from her, she always goes to the limit and over it. That makes her a really incredible person and a really good bike rider too, one of the biggest riders in the world. If I look back now, it’s really cool to win this way, to win the sprint against Lotte and not have it be a gift.”
That was very much after the race during the press conference, in the heat of the moment after the finish, the emotions were rather different from Vollering, according to onlookers throwing a Dutch expletive at Kopecky, something that Vollering didn’t deny.
“I don’t remember,” said Vollering. “I don’t think so, but if I said so, it was more as a joke, like ‘what did you do to me’. Maybe it happened in all the emotions, emotions are really high after a finish like this.”
Team director van der Breggen confirmed that there hadn’t been team instructions and also downplayed the alleged insult thrown out by Vollering.
“We didn’t say anything, we didn’t think they would be together at the end,” Van der Breggen explained. “They caught Faulkner very late. What counts is one and two, and the intense emotions after the finish are just first reactions.”
With an awkward hug-come-headlock on the podium as a further expression of the uneasiness between the pair, whether the teamwork will be the same between them in the future is yet to be seen.
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