“That’s how we roll!” shouts Mischa Bredewold into her sports director’s face at the SD Worx-Protime bus in Poitiers. A handful of minutes have passed since her team-mate, Lorena Wiebes, thrashed everyone in the sprint on stage four of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. The victory made it two in two days for the squad, and back-to-back wins for the Dutchwoman. Bredewold and the rest of the squad could not stop smiling. Everything was right in the world.
This time last year, however, the same scene cast a different mood. The best sprinter in the world, Wiebes left the Tour winless, an outcome nobody had predicted. She'd come into the race from winning five out of six stages at the Baloise Ladies Tour. What had gone wrong?
