Lucinda Brand (Lidl-Trek) went on the attack on the fourth and final stage of the Vuelta a Burgos Féminas, starting the decisive climb of the Alto de Rozavientos a minute ahead of the peloton and eventually finishing runner-up behind stage and GC winner Demi Vollering (SD Worx-Protime).
Organisers rewarded Brand with the combativity prize for her move, which may not have happened without Brand’s actions on stage 1. On the opening day, Brand stopped within 150 metres of the line to make sure her crashed teammate, Elisa Balsamo, was all right.
Since Brand technically wasn’t directly held up by the crash, she was given a three-minute time deficit. Without this time loss, the 34-year-old Dutchwoman would theoretically have finished on the GC podium – but Brand said that things were more complicated than that.
“Then I wouldn’t have gotten a one-minute advantage, to be honest! I think I still would have done a good climb, but not so good that I would suddenly be on the GC podium, we need to be realistic. Sometimes, this also gives you some benefit in another way,” Brand told Cyclingnews.
“I just wanted to try to get in a break today because I knew it would be a good situation for me with the descent in the final. It had nothing to do with the first day. I just felt good the whole week, so I wanted to make something good out of it.”
Brazilian champion Tota Magalhães had been solo at the front of the race for almost 20km before Brand joined her with 30km to go, bridging from a short-lived breakaway. As the live footage was interrupted because of bad weather, we asked Brand to recap the action.
“There was a little break going, but there was no real cooperation. I attacked from that, and nobody was reacting, so I could ride to her. Then I tried to motivate her to just keep doing her best, she was already suffering a lot which was normal with her solo ride before. We just tried to keep up the pace as much as possible,” she explained.
Together, they increased their advantage to a minute before Brand continued on her own on the Rozavientos climb.
“I still had around one minute, so I just tried to find a good pace, have a good rhythm. I knew that the second part was steeper, so I had to keep something left for that,” she said.
Passed by Vollering on the last part of the climb, Brand still had a chance to maybe come back on the descent, but she was hampered by the lack of information on the gap to the GC leader. After the descent, Brand was only 22 seconds behind with 5km to go but lost ground again on the slight uphill to the line, finishing 51 seconds down in the end.
“She did a really good descent; it was also a bit sketchy because of a lot of stuff from the trees and little stones on the road. Maybe there were motorbikes behind me, but I saw nothing in front," Brand said.
"At some moments, I did see a car, which I assumed was riding behind Demi, but I really didn’t know until we were down. It was a straight road for a little bit, which was going up, so that was in her advantage again."
