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‘Ridiculous’ – Tactics questioned as Marianne Vos falls short at 2024 UCI Road World Championships
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Published 28/09/2024 at 23:11 GMT+1
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Marianne Vos remains one of the fastest women in cycling but she was not in contention for the sprint finish at the 2024 UCI Road World Championships on Saturday in Zurich. Speaking to Eurosport, pundit and former cyclist Adam Blythe believes Demi Vollering, her Dutch team-mate, hampered her chances by riding too aggressively at earlier points in the race.
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Adam Blythe has criticised tactics that he deems cost Marianne Vos an opportunity at winning the road race world title.
The race in Zurich was won by Belgium’s Lotte Kopecky, who successfully defended the title she won last year.
Veteran rider Marianne Vos was not in contention when the race hit the final sprint, and Blythe thinks that Vollering cost her Dutch team-mate by riding too hard earlier in the course.
Speaking to Eurosport, Blythe questioned the choices made by Vollering. The Dutch leader set other team-mates including Pauliena Rooijakkers on the front of the bunch in an attempt to whittle down the remaining podium contenders, and was part of a group chasing a small leading quartet including Vos in the latter stages of the race.
With just shy of 10km to go, Vollering attacked on a steep climb, bringing rivals including Kopecky with her but dropping team-mates Riejanne Markus and Vos, who could not chase back on to fight for victory.
He said: “The way she rode today was - I want to be respectful - stupid.
“But I think in a way that she knew what she was capable of, but the way that she did it, and the way that her team-mates were around her, was ridiculous.
"She had Marianne Vos in that group. Vos was at the back of that group. There were points when Demi was driving at the front.
"For me that's acceptable because Vos is still within that group, but times when you start to go uphill and you start to drive it, that for me then is when you've got one of the quickest women in the world [and with] Kopecky not in that group, Demi should be wise to that and she's not.
"She never once at any time looks round and stops. She's doing long pulls on the front without looking around, seeing who's there and going back at it."
Blythe's fellow ex-professional cyclist and Eurosport pundit Dani Rowe also questioned the Dutch squad's tactics.
She said: “With 16km to go, when you’ve got Vos there who’s the fastest finisher within that group, even if Kopecky had come back in, I would have been confident Marianne Vos would have won that sprint.
"She’s dropping her, I just don’t understand it, I really don’t."
Rowe added: “With the parcours that they had left it was always going to come down to a sprint. There wasn’t any climbs that were hard enough in that final for Demi Vollering to ride to the finish solo.
“There were some very, very fast finishers still in that group. I totally understand that you’re going for your own World Championship, of course she’s got the pedigree to do that, but when you get to the back-end of a race with Marianne Vos there, having bridged across to a group previously to have that sliding room on the steepest part of the climbs, that was their best option, even for a podium.”
The UCI Road World Championships races, unlike regular WorldTour events, are raced without race radios, meaning riders do not have the same methods of communication within teams as they normally do and have to be even more aware of the situation on the road.
Blythe later considered how strident his analysis had been, and measured his opinion a little later, saying: "If Vollering attacks in that group, Vos doesn't have to follow. Who's everyone going to look at? Kopecky and Vos. Vos isn't going to do that, that forces Kopecky to chase, Kopecky gets tired.
"I think she [Vollering] had a good chance of going solo today, but she needed a team-mate in there because all eyes were on her. She was the strongest in the race but she never timed it right and never judged it right.
"Having Vos in that group would have been a benefit to her winning rather than, 'Vos is in this group, I don't have a chance now'.
"I just think they [the Dutch] looked at it the wrong way: instead of looking at strength in numbers, they looked at it [as], 'I want to be on my own'."
Blythe added: "By the way, it wasn’t stupid. I’m sorry Demi, but it was just very, very questionable.
"When you look around, look who's in that group, look what you can do, you're doing it in the places you can do it.
"There were times when she was riding downhill hard, but for what?"
Ultimately, Vollering finished fifth, unable to compete with Kopecky's sprint in the finale, with Vos and Markus eighth and ninth respectively.
Watch all the action of the men’s UCI World Championships road race from 09:00 UK time on discovery+
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