After catapulting herself off the front of the Schwalbe One Day Classic with 7km remaining, it seemed liked the dream scenario for Chloé Dygert – avoiding a bunch sprint and potentially claiming victory.

Unfortunately, other teams had different plans and still had matches to burn, reeling her back in and bringing the race to a bunch finish. Chloé fought hard in the final sprint, securing a solid 4th place in the 1.Pro event.

Neve Bradbury explains the team tactics for the 90km kermesse-style race around the outskirts of downtown Adelaide:

“Plan A was to get Chloé in the breakaway and have her win solo. If that didn’t work, we would back her for a sprint. We wanted to make it a hard race, especially in the second half, and let the other teams do the work in the first half. Team GreenEDGE were active at the start, and then they formed a two-rider breakaway, which wasn’t ideal for us because it meant that it was quite easy in the bunch.”

With five laps of the 4.1km circuit remaining, CANYON//SRAM zondacrypto ramped up efforts, attacking and riding aggressively to weaken the field and set up the perfect situation for Chloé to launch an offensive.

With two laps to go, Tiffany Cromwell sacrificed herself to stretch the peloton and provide the momentum for Chloé to attack on the one QOM climb of the circuit – a gradual 500 ascent at 4%.

“Tiff had a really strong lead-out for me into the base of the climb, where I launched my attack with a lap and a half to go,” Chloé says. “I was able to get a gap and hold off the peloton for a while, but once I saw they were coming back, I sat up and waited for the sprint.”

Expertly led out by Maike van der Duin into the finishing straight with 300m remaining, Chloé opened her sprint early and maintained her power to the line, but was overtaken by those able to jump later from behind and go harder for the shorter distance.

“Unfortunately by setting up the attack, there was a lot of our team swinging off the back, so it set us up for a sprint with just Maike and myself, I think if we would have had one more person in our train, we would have had a better shot for, if not the win, at least a podium. The sprint was a little too long out of that turn.”

For those curious about the astonishing numbers behind Chloé’s performance, she reflects on how the effort of holding off a WorldTour peloton on such a fast, frenetic course was more taxing than she initially realised.

“I felt fine for the sprint because I had a downhill section to recover a bit, but looking at the power data, I was averaging almost 440 watts for four minutes, so it was a really big effort.”

With time in Adelaide now coming to a close, Chloé and the Down Under squad look to recover for the next phase of racing in Victoria. First up is the UCI 1.1 Surf Coast Classic on January 29th, followed by the UCI WWT Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race on February 2nd.

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