Grace Brown is one stage away from a maiden Women's Tour victory after maintaining the slimmest of overall leads in the race's penultimate, hill-top finish at Black Mountain on Saturday in the United Kingdom.
The Aussie finished third on stage five in Carmarthenshire, just behind winner Elisa Longo Borghini and second-placed Kasia Niewiadoma — all three of whom have been exchanging the overall race lead this past week.
Brown picked up valuable bonus seconds in the final climb, ensuring that her and the Italian Borghini will enter the final day in equal-first position on the leaderboard, while Poland's Niewiadoma is just two seconds behind.
The 106.6km stage began at Pembrey Country Park and wound into the Welsh hillside, with Joss Lowden opening an early lead on the chasing group and larger peloton.
But Lowden was caught 43km into the stage as the leading group — which contained the race's top three — extended the gap over the pack by over a minute. However, the peloton eventually caught the breakaways with 23km remaining as the riders reached the foot of Black Mountain.
Dutch rider Ellen van Dijk set the pace as the climb began — it reaches a 21 per cent gradient in some places — with no clear front-runner emerging in the final 5km. But the reigning Italian road race champion Borghini timed her final push perfectly, breaking off from the pack and out-sprinting both Brown and Niewiadoma at the end of the 7.2km climb.
"It was quite a race into the bottom of it, all the [general classification] riders had the lead-outs from their teams," Brown said afterwards.
"My team had done a lot of work all day, so we were down to one rider in the end, but I managed to stay at the front. Then the wind neutralised the climb a little bit from too many attacks, but it was still hard, really hard in the last kilometre.
"There was a bit of doubt because I knew that if I wanted to stay ahead in time then I needed to come second on Elisa's wheel with no gap, but then it worked out that if I came third we were equal. I didn't know how it worked in terms of countback, but I retained the jersey."
Sunday's final 142.9km stage will begin in Chipping Norton and finish in Oxford's city centre with 16 bonus seconds on offer.
"It will be really cool," the 29-year-old Victorian said of the dramatic final stage.
"The Cotswolds are almost a second home, because my husband's family are from the area, so I'm going to have a lot of support out on the road and it will be special to be in the leader's jersey for tomorrow's race."
