The day began early with the women starting off in beautiful tuscan fall-weather. The early starts saw some surprisingly strong times by the Rusvelo team and they set the standard for the teams to come. When the big favorites went at the end the pattern quickly emerged in the split times, Spec-lulu looked slightly faster than the others and it soon shaped up like a battle for silver and bronze between the Rabobank team and Australian Orica-AIS. Behind those MCipollini impressed alongside Rusvelo while other contenders like Wiggle, and Hitec Products looked to be out of the running.
On the second half of the course Specialized-lululemon proved why they are head and shoulders above everyone else in this discipline by ramping up the pace to steadily increase their lead over the competition. Rabobank also looked to be the team that had gauged their effort best and they went from being slightly behind Orica to beating them on the line by some 23 seconds. So silver went to Rabobank while Orica took bronze and Rusvelo rode strongly to finish just outside the podium.
On the winning team, that impressively finished with all six riders together, Evelyn Stevens, Trixi Worrack and Ellen van Dijk were all on the winning team last year while Lisa Brennauer, Katie Colclough and Carmen Small all won their first gold medals on the road. See the report from the race here:
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Omega Pharma get revenge on Orica
It was a good day for Specialized allround as Omega Pharma managed a repeat of last years win. There seems to be a nice little TTT-rivalry developing between them and Orica-GreenEdge as they exchange blows in the big races. In the Tour de France it was Orica who came out on top with the narrowest of margins and today OPQS turned the tables on them by winning an equally tight race. 0.81 seconds was the final margin between the two with Sky Procycling rounding out the podium another 22 seconds behind.
On the winning team for OPQS in what really was one of the best TTTs we've seen in a long while were: Tony Martin, Sylvain Chavanel, Niki Terpstra, Michal Kwiatkowski, Kristof Vandewalle and Peter Velits. Here's the video report:
Women Top 10:
- Specialized lululemon 51.10
- Rabobank + 1.11
- Orica-AIS +1:34
- Rusvelo +2.03
- MCipollini-Giordana 2.19
- Wiggle-Honda 2.33
- Argos-Shimano 2.51
- Team Optum p/b Kelly Benefits 3.03
- Sengers Ladies 3.06
- Boels Dolmans 3.34
- Omega Pharma-Quickstep 1.04.16
- Orica-Greenedge +0.81sec
- Sky + 23 sec
- BMC +1.03
- Radioshack Leopard Trek +1.18
- Astana + 1.22
- Cannondale +1.29
- Garmin-Sharp + 2.02
- Saxo-Tinkoff + 2.14
- Movistar + 2.32