Energiewacht Tour: Velocio-SRAM win TTT

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Velocio-SRAM won the stage 2 of the Energiewacht Tour, the reigning world champions unsurprisingly winning the 14.7 kilometre team time trial. Boels Dolman was second at 14 seconds, with RaboLiv Women in third.

Trixi Worrack, three times a member of the world championship squad led the team over the line to take the race lead. "We raced well together and everyone shared the work, okay there were a few mistakes but nothing too big, and we are really happy to win," Worrack said.

Worrack was joined by Lisa Brennauer, Tayler Wiles, Barbara Guarischi, Tiffany Cromwell and Alena Amialiuisk in winning the stage. Velocio-SRAM’s achievement was even more impressive considering that only two of their six riders, Worrack and current ITT champion Brennauer were part of the 2014 gold medal winning squad, and only Worrack had raced to win all three titles.

“We didn’t know how we would go, we had our first training as a team this week”, she told Cyclingnews “We just had one training day on the course, and it went really well, so we’re happy”

“We want to keep the yellow jersey, it doesn’t matter who it is from the team. I think it will be really windy on Borkum on Sunday, and it will bring a new result. We’ve never raced on this island, so it will be something new. We hope the next stages will be windy, as we have a good group for that, and it makes the race more interesting”.

In the first of two stages for the elite women today, the Energiewacht Tour was in Peize for the first Team Time Trial of the season, and the first chance to see how the big teams are shaping up.

The 14.4km course included some technical corners, with a long straight section that gave the teams the chance to really get up some speed, and all the teams had one eye on learning with the World Championships in mind, as well as the opportunity to shake up the Tour’s General Classification.

The small German team Feminine Cycling Team set a strong early time of 19:34.15 that lasted until Team USA’s 19:22.91, and then the top times kept falling. Boels-Dolmans, who have made no secret that they have big TTT ambitions, finished fastest with 18:13.00, but there were two teams left to come, and out on the course it was clear from the splits that Velocio-SRAM, who as Specialized-lululemon have won all three Trade Team TTT World Championships, were in a different league. They finished 14 seconds fastest, at 17:59.06, and while Rabo-Liv were the last to finish, they couldn’t compete, finishing third behind Boels at 18:29.80.

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