The Tour of Chongming Island stage 2 podium ceremony was a special sight as Marta Lach and her Ceratizit-WNT teammates Mylène de Zoete and Kathrin Schweinberger occupied all three podium steps.
By sprinting to an unprecedented podium sweep, the blue-and-red-clad team made Women’s WorldTour history.
"This is something unbelievable, and it feels amazing to stand on the podium with the teammates, and I will never forget this. It’s something that we never thought about before the race, and it came out perfect for us," Lach told Cyclingnews.
"We did amazing the whole race, Laura [Asencio] and Marta [Jaskulska] were chasing all the breakaways. For the final, they and Sandra [Alonso] did a perfect lead-out for us until the last 400 metres. Sandra did a super-long lead-out, then Kathrin did an amazing long sprint."
With Schweinberger leading them out, Lach was in the role of ‘sweeper’ on the wheel of stage 1 winner De Zoete, making sure that no sprint rival could come out of the yellow jersey’s slipstream.
Lach and De Zoete then passed their Austrian teammate on the left and right to take first and second place. Lach had asked De Zoete before the race if she should go for the win herself in such a situation like this.
"She said, ‘Yes, of course, then you win also, and we can play more cards’. I was really grateful for this. In the end, it doesn’t matter who wins because it’s a team victory and team podium," Lach explained.
"It’s very special for me and for the whole team, how we work together, it was just perfect."
While it isn’t uncommon for two teammates to podium in a race, a total podium sweep is much rarer. Since the introduction of the Women’s WorldTour category for the 2016 season, there has been only one 1-2-3 in a WWT race – stage 8 of the 2023 Tour de France Femmes when Marlen Reusser, Demi Vollering, and Lotte Kopecky took the three top spots in the Pau ITT for SD Worx.
SD Worx also managed two podium sweeps on the summit finish stages 2 and 9 of the 2021 Giro d’Italia Donne, which was not a WorldTour race that season, through Anna van der Breggen, Ashleigh-Moolman-Pasio, and Vollering. However, they arrived in ones or twos after hard finishing climbs; sprinting to a 1-2-3 is unprecedented in at least the last nine seasons.
It also isn’t something you can really plan, as shown by the cautionary tale of SD Worx-Protime at this year’s Tour of Britain Women. After winning stages 1 to 3 with Kopecky and Lorena Wiebes, the team wanted to reward Christine Majerus, so Kopecky and Wiebes held back. However, Ruby Roseman-Gannon (Liv-AlUla-Jayco) outsprinted all three of them, leaving the team with a disappointing 2-3-4.
Going into the final stage, De Zoete, Lach, and Schweinberger are first, second, and fourth overall. And Lach promised that they weren’t done yet.
“We will try to hopefully be with three on the GC podium. We’ll try our best to take as much as possible from this. I’m very proud of my team and how we work together, how we are as a group and as teammates, and also huge thanks to our whole staff for the job they do here,” she finished.
