With stage 3 winner Lorena Wiebes (Team SD Worx) out of the race, Charlotte Kool (Team DSM-Firmenich) was the big favourite to win stage 6 of the Tour de France Femmes to Blagnac. And Kool did win the sprint– but unfortunately for her, it was a sprint for second place as Emma Norsgaard (Movistar Team) from the early breakaway just held off the sprinters by one second.
When Kool arrived at the team bus, she looked crestfallen, handing her bike to a mechanic before hugging her teammates who gave her soft words of encouragement. Kool then disappeared into the team bus for some time before coming out again to face the questions of the media, only speaking Cyclingnews, Dutch TV channel L1, and Belgian TV channel Sporza.
"It is my biggest nightmare ever, I think. I have certainly felt better than I do now," Kool used strong words to describe her emotions. "When you win the sprint in the Tour but there is someone just ahead, so close, yes, I think it's the biggest nightmare. I know that I am young, and I'm sure that this win will come eventually. But every time in your life that you get the chance to win a Tour stage, you want to win," she continued.
Unlike the previous Tour de France Femmes stages when an escapee held off the peloton, Kool thought that there was good cooperation in the chase, and the crash on the final kilometre at the crossing of a set of tram tracks wasn't to blame for the near-miss, either.
"We really gave everything, and I think that many other teams helped, we all put in the work, and the speed was high. That wasn't the problem. The gap was just too big even before the crash," the 24-year-old Dutchwoman commented.
Kool had been dropped on one of the day's four classified climbs, and her team worked hard to bring her back to the bunch before taking charge of the chase behind the breakaway that contained Agnieszka Skalniak-Sójka (Canyon-SRAM) and Sandra Alonso (Ceratizit-WNT) in addition to Norsgaard.
"We knew that still there was a lot of time to come back, and my team did a great job to bring me back. Maybe we lost a bit of time there before we could start to chase for real. I thought we would make it. You always have to keep believing in it, and I know that you can make up a lot of time quickly. I hoped that we could catch them on the line, but unfortunately, we didn't. There were just three riders who were too strong today," Kool said.
