At the sign-in for stage 1 of the RideLondon Classique in Saffron Walden, Rebecca Koerner (Uno-X Mobility) was easy to spot in the red-and-white jersey of the Danish national champion. The 23-year-old will wear a different jersey on stage 2, though: She went into the breakaway and won all three QOM sprints, putting her in the orange-and-blue QOM jersey.
“We wanted to have an aggressive race and be out front with at least one rider. Luckily, I was the one who got to get away. I've really been looking forward to getting into a real breakaway, and today I succeeded, so I'm really happy,” Koerner said in the post-stage interview.
She and Lea Lin Teutenberg (Ceratizit-WNT) got away very early in the 159.2-kilometre stage and split the QOM and sprint points between themselves, sharing the workload on their ride of 140km before being caught with 16.5km to go.
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“It would have been better to have more people out there, but the two of us cooperated well, and we had a nice day together. In the end, I managed to get what I came for, I’m happy about that,” Koerner said about her day ahead of the pack on the Essex roads.
The Dane is another lateral entrant into women’s cycling: In her youth, she practiced high diving and had won three Danish championships at age 18.
But after injuring her hip and back when she fell badly in the diving pool, she switched to road cycling, buying her first race bike in 2019.
Koerner spent the next two seasons with the well-known Copenhagen cycling club ABC (Arbejdernes Bicycle Club). In 2021, she took six domestic victories in the red-white-blue kit, including a stage and the GC in the prestigious Randers Bike Week, and was selected for the World Championships.
For 2022, Koerner signed with the Uno-X Pro Cycling Team, still her current squad, and in 2023, she won the Danish road championships from an early breakaway, finishing with a 32-kilometre solo.
Looking ahead to Saturday, Koerner hopes to defend her new orange-and-blue jersey.
“It would be nice to keep the jersey also after tomorrow, but we will have to see how the stage goes tomorrow,” she said.
There are no QOMs on the final stage in the centre of London, and stage 2 has the same number of QOMs as stage 1. This means that even if someone were to win all stage 2 QOMs, they could at most draw equal to Koerner, putting the GC position into play as a tiebreaker.
Koerner lost 20 seconds on the uphill finish in Colchester and is 54th overall, 22 seconds behind stage winner Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime), and the QOM classification could even come down to bonus seconds at the intermediate sprint in London. But if Koerner manages to snatch just one QOM point on stage 2, she only has to finish the race to win the orange jersey.
