De Panne: Superb piloting by Brennauer enables Wild victory
Kirsten Wild (WNT-Rotor) won the Driedaagse Brugge-De Panne one-day race on Thursday after a thrilling finale culminating a mass sprint with nearly all the top sprinters. Cyclingnews takes a closer look at the final kilometres as we analyse the sprints of Wild and the other podium finishers, Lorena Wiebes (Parkhotel Valkenburg) and Lotte Kopecky (Lotto Soudal Ladies).
Trek-Segafredo, Boels Dolmans, and Mitchelton-Scott all took charge of affairs from 6km to go. About 2,000 metres from the finish, Kopecky had been brought close to the front by her teammates, and Wiebes had found the wheel of Marianne Vos (CCC-Liv) to sit on.
At this point, Wild was still far back in the peloton, sitting around position 40. Her teammate Lisa Brennauer was a bit further ahead in position 30 and started to move up about 1.5km from the finish. Wild took the cue and pushed hard to get onto Brennauer's wheel; the Dutch sprinter was then expertly piloted to the very front.
Under the red kite with 1,000 metres to go, Brennauer, with Wild in her wheel, had taken the lead. From here on, Wild used her race craft to stay near the front but out of the wind. Team Sunweb took over just before the right-hand turn across the tram tracks with 700 metres to go.
Christine Majerus (Boels Dolmans) came to the front to lead out her teammate Amalie Dideriksen 450 metres from the line. When the Danish champion launched her sprint with 300 metres to go, there were two lines of sprinters next to each other, close to the barriers on the right side of the road: Dideriksen with Kopecky, Susanne Andersen (Team Sunweb), Marta Bastianelli (Team Virtu Cycling), and Chloe Hosking (Alé Cipollini) behind her, and Lepistö followed by Wild, Wiebes, and Vos.
Lepistö went for Dideriksen's slipstream, and a gap opened on the left side that Wild and Wiebes took full advantage of to launch their sprints 250 metres from the line. But while Wiebes still had to go around Majerus, Wild had a free road to the finish ahead of her.
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