Good morning everyone and welcome in the Netherlands for the Ronde van het Ijsselmeer. And as expected, there's quite a bit of wind today., around 64 km/h near the start. Only time will tell how it will affect the final outcome of this new classic.
Interestingly, the bookies favor sprinters with a good flat stat over expert favourite Degenkolb. A sign of what's to come?
Immediately, an attack. It's hard to see how they will stay ahead with so many teams wanting a sprint, but for some teams, it's probably their only shot.
Three riders already half a minute ahead, looks like the break of the day has already been formed:
Lecourt De Billot De Haes O'Brien
Onto the first dyke however, Le Court
makes a jump and reaches the first three with ease.
The peloton lets them go, with Burghardt up front, despite Podium Ambition's presence in the breakway. Looks like he's mainly trying to slow down the peloton, and he's achieving just that: Three minutes for the leaders after 20 kilometres already.
And there we go, 170 kilometres to go and the first break within the pack. Of the sprinters, only Guardini and Te Brake seem to have been surprised, as they are not in the main group!
It proved to be a false alarm, everyone is back in the peloton. Though the leaders only have two minutes left now. 150 kilometres to go.
A lot of silence then, mainly caused by a lot less wind (40kph average now). Though with 30 kilometres to go, Carrefour is giving it one final go!
And there's some effect! Once again, Guardini and Te Brake get dropped from the main group. Not a disaster for their teams though, as both have better sprinters left in the pack.
Carrefour drops the pace, and no other team seems to want to take over. Instead, there's an attack by Stewart and Vanmarcke, who are closing in on the breakaway riders quite fast!
But they get swallowed up quite quickly, mainly due to the work of Netia. Interesting, because despite having a good sprinter, they don't have a favourite in this race.
The rapid pace also means the breakaway gets caught. Le Court is the last of them to survive. 15 kilometres to go.
Meanwhile the pace is making a lot of riders drop from the peloton, which has only 53 riders left. And the team who certainly doesn't want to hear this news is Carrefour, as Vanderbiest has been dropped! Surprising, since they were actually the team that started the crosswinds only 20 kilometres ago.
And it doesn't look like we're going to see a mass sprint, because with only 12 kilometres to go, 15 riders get a gap over the rest of the peloton! The names are:
Van der Sande
Sakala
Vanbilsen
Ford
Holloway
Bernas
Rowe
Kuznetsov
Reckweg
Van Asbroeck
Saber
Langeveld
Lander
Chawchiangkwang
and Degenkolb.
And with over a minute already, it looks like the odds for them to stay ahead of the pack are in their favor. Some teams won't be happy about this!
Attack by Holloway?! What a crazy move from the sprinter, but it might have been a good one, as he has 32 seconds over the other 14 riders quite quickly.
Rowe tries to attack a little bit later, and almost reaches Holloway with around 5 kilometres to go!
Actually the entire main group has fallen apart. Three riders now have a small gap on them. After that comes a quite complete peloton, even Vanderbiest has returned there. So for clearance, here's the situation:
Rowe is having huge trouble trying to catch Holloway. Only 8 seconds, but he seems to be struggling heavily. He got so close, but look at the gap they have made already... Looks like the winner will be decided between them!
A bit further behind, Ewan, and Vanderbiest try to cross the gap to what once was the 15-man leader group. Behind them is what can be called the peloton, with riders like Mohs and Vantomme, who clearly don't feel like fighting for more than a 15-20th position.
Meanwhile at the front though, there's no more question left: Dan Holloway wins a stormy first edition of the Ronde van het Ijsselmeer! The American rider proved he's no wussy and decided to make the best use of his ability to ride over the flat. And what better place to do that than in the Netherlands.
Luke Rowe finishes second, a result he should be happy with. Though I wonder what would've happened if he managed to close the 8-second gap in the final kilometres.
Two (!) minutes behind them, no one manged to escape from the group eventually. Vanbilsen is in front under the banner, though they're all completely tired. I doubt anyone is even still able to sprint!
Well, they didn't sprint, but on pure strength Degenkolb actually manages to not suffer that much damage from the way the race went and finished third. Vanbilsen got fourth in front of Lander. The top 10 is completed by Reckweg, Saber, Van Asbroeck, Van der Sande and Sakala – lots of amateur points being scored here for Signal Iduna!
Once the leftovers of the breakway have finished, including Ewan (15th) and Vanderbiest (16th), the peloton actually still fancies a sprint, though it's only for some depth points: Fablok wins it easily, getting 18th, 19th and 20th. But all it means is that they had a lot of energy left to attack earlier on... Bad gamble to stay in the pack for them, that's for sure.
And that's it for today's coverage! Holloway found himself the perfect race to show that he can not only sprint, but attack, too. And only a few MG legends can say the same. Well done!
