Hola, La Vuelta 🇪🇸

➕ about 10000 other races this week!

May 05, 2023

Hello lovely subscribers and welcome to Women’s Cycling Weekly! 🚴‍♀️

You know we’re well into the season when the ‘results’ and' ‘upcoming races’ sections of this newsletter are FULL of info 🤩.

Ofc the biggest race going on right now is the Vuelta Femenina aka the first ‘grand tour’ of the season and the first time we’ll see Demi Vollering and Annemiek van Vleuten take on a mountain stage together on Sunday. Demi might have won today but is it just me or did we see a bit of 2022 Annemiek on today’s climb?

Before we get exited about Lagos de Covadonga, though, shout out to Marianne Vos who continues to prove why she’s the absolute GOAT having won two stages (three if you include the TTT) even out-sprinting Charlotte Kool 🤯 (who herself won stage 2). (P.s I do think it’s a shame that there aren’t many ‘pure’ sprint stages out there for the fast girlies but hopefully as stage races get longer this will come!!)

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PS. if you are a paid subscriber remember that this week there was no Wednesday newsletter as I will instead be sending out a post-Vuelta one after the race!! If you’re not already a paid subscriber and like the sound of that then you can always

Have a lovely weekend,

Amy x

News 📰

Honestly sick of writing about Zaaf now, but unfortunately not as sick of them as Michaela Drummond and Debora Silvestri must be after they were blocked from racing the Vuelta due to some technicality in which Zaaf must approve the fact that the former riders have left the team before the Spanish fed/Spanish labour laws will accept their new teams 😵‍💫. Lucking that’s now been resolved, at least for Drummond.
The UCI had a meeting and have decided to make certain track events equal length such as the individual pursuit which will go from 3km to 4km (2km to 3km for juniors) a kilo rather than 500m, 10km scratch races and tempo races. This will only come into place in 2025, however.
In the same meeting they also said that they discussed the participation of transgender athletes with their objective being: “to take into consideration, in the context of the evolution of our society, the desire of transgender athletes to practise cycling.” More info here.
Two further Zaaf victims have found teams, Australian Danielle De Francesco will join Arkéa while Canadian national champion Maggie Coles-Lyster is reported to have joined Israel-Premier Tech Roland.
ASO have announced the route for the inaugural women’s Tour de l’Avenir U23 race which will take place from the 28th August to the 1st September.
Trek-Segafredo will become Lidl-Trek from the (presumably men’s) Tour de France after the supermarket chain signed on as title sponsor for an undisclosed amount of time.