Lorena Wiebes wins windswept second stage at the UAE Tour Women

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Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx) sprinted to victory on stage 2 of the UAE Tour Women. The European champion launched from the wheel of Charlotte Kool (Team DSM) in the final 200 metres and beat Kool to the line, with Kool's lead-out Pfeiffer Georgi taking third place.

As the most recent stage winner, Wiebes is the new overall leader, lying at the same time as stage 1 winner Kool. Chiara Consonni (UAE Team ADQ) lies third overall at 10 seconds.

The stage was hit by high winds and dominated by echelon action right from the start, with a group of 19 minutes ahead of the rest of the peloton for a long time.

The peloton eventually caught up with 43km to go, and a trailing group finally returned at the 20km mark. However, in the last 10km, the race split again in the crosswinds, with Marta Cavalli (FDJ-Suez) among the riders losing ground in the GC battle.

"Today was a tough stage but we flow with the go. We showed again that we have a good lead-out. DSM was coming up from the left side, but Barbara [Guarischi, ed.] brought me into the perfect position, and I could sprint as I wanted," Wiebes recounted after the finish.

"It was really windy, and we started directly with crosswinds. We were four of our team in the first group. Then the group came back, and with the headwind, another group came back, so I think it was almost a full peloton again.

"But we also knew there would be some crosswinds in the final ten kilometres, so the girls did a really great job to protect me there also and then we set up the lead-out."

Following a hard day in the winds, 69 riders remain with a minute of Wiebes and the race lead ahead of the decisive stage 3 with its summit finish at Jebel Hafeet.

How it happened

Starting at Al Dhafra Castle, stage 2 covered 133 km through the Abu Dhabi desert. The first half of the stage went roughly from east to west before the course turned north towards the finish in Al Mirfa.

There was action from the start as Team DSM, SD Worx, and UAE Team ADQ put the race in the gutter in strong crosswinds, forcing echelons and forming a front group of 19 riders that gained up to two minutes on the biggest peloton, with a third group even further down the road.

The front group consisted of stage 1 winner Charlotte Kool (Team DSM) and her teammates Pfeiffer Georgi, Franziska Koch, and Daniek Hengeveld, Team SD Worx's Lorena Wiebes, Femke Markus, Barbara Guarischi.

Also along for the ride were Lonneke Uneken, Chiara Consonni, Marta Bastianelli, and Silvia Persico from UAE Team ADQ, Marjolein van't Geloof and Lily Williams from Human Powered Health, as well as Elisa Longo Borghini (Trek-Segafredo), Emma Norsgaard (Movistar Team), Audrey Cordon-Ragot (Zaaf Cycling Team), Agnieszka Skalniak-Sójka (Canyon-Sram), Mylene de Zoete (Ceratizit-WNT), and Christina Schweinberger (Fenix-Deceuninck).

Persico suffered a mechanical but quickly returned to the front, and Skalniak-Sójka won the first intermediate sprint in Madinat Zayed to take the lead in the intermediate sprint classification. Longo Borghini was second to take two bonus seconds.

The second group slowly reduced the deficit with 75 km to go as an acceleration in the front group caused Cordon-Ragot, Persico, Consonni, Williams, Van't Geloof, De Zoete, Schweinberger, and Markus to lose contact. The chasing peloton eventually absorbed them, but the gap had gone back up to a minute.

With the front group down to only 11 riders, this gap slowly but surely went down, and the two groups joined up with 43 km to go, soon after the second intermediate sprint had been won by Bastianelli ahead of Skalniak-Sójka and Longo Borghini.

At this point, the last group, including a.o. GC contenders Cavalli and Kristen Faulkner (Jayco-AlUla) was over five minutes behind. But they kept chasing hard into a headwind while the pace in the peloton dropped and finally made contact with 20 km to go.

In the last ten kilometres, the wind picked up again and turned to a crosswind. SD Worx, Canyon-Sram, and Fenix-Deceuninck cranked up the pace and forced a split in the peloton; Cavalli who had just come back after a 100-kilometre chase was one of the riders that lost contact.

When Team DSM came to the front with a full lead-out train 1400 metres to go, Wiebes was briefly boxed in a bit. But Guarischi piloted her to the front and onto Kool's wheel. After a long, sweeping right-hand turn with 200 metres to go, both Kool and Wiebes started the sprint at the same time, and Wiebes had the higher speed, winning the stage a bike length ahead of her former teammate.

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