Somebody must have forgotten to show Riejanne Markus the script for stage two of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
Destiny had written it as follows: Lorena Wiebes wins a routine bunch sprint and takes her first victory in the yellow jersey.
That, in the end, was the closing scene, but not without Markus’s best efforts to foil it.
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Peeling off the front of the breakaway with 39km to go, the Lidl-Trek rider charged solo to the finish, skirting around the shore of Lake Geneva and into the Swiss city. Her gap stayed steady at around a minute. Until, closing in towards the line, it began to fall, the seconds trickling away rather than tumbling.
Fans in their thousands tilted onto their tiptoes along the finish straight to see if she’d hold off the pack. It would have been, they thought, the perfect antidote to a foregone conclusion. But with 400m to go, Wiebes and the sprint trains barrelled over the top, and Markus was absorbed into the swell of the bunch.
The Dutchwoman’s result on the day read 76th, but it didn’t tell the story of how narrow the finale was.
“I came pretty close, and I honestly didn’t expect that,” Markus said afterwards. “Of course, we wanted to be part of the game, but I knew that the sprinters really wanted to get a chance today because this was the most suitable stage for a sprint. But then I came actually pretty close, so it was actually pretty disappointing in the end.”
Stage two was, as many correctly tipped, a day made for Wiebes. She is the most dominant sprinter of her generation – perhaps of all time – who has collected 133 career wins at the age of 27. Seven of those have come at the Tour de France Femmes – a tally bettered by no one. Did Markus think she could have starved her of her latest one?
“In the last kilometres, I was not thinking about the win really,” the Lidl-Trek rider said. “I was just trying to go all-out, and be as quick as possible.
“Actually, 1km before the finish, I thought, ‘They’re still not here. When are they coming?’ Then with 500m to go, I felt like, ‘Ooo.’ Then at 400m, they came. It was really disappointing, actually, but I’m really proud of the effort.”
It was a credit to the Dutchwoman’s strength that Wiebes’s SD Worx-Protime team chose to chase her down with their GC leader Anna van der Breggen and former world champion Lotte Kopecky. “It was a gap I couldn’t close really easily,” Kopecky said post-race. “We rode full gas, and we didn’t come any closer.
“We know Riejanne and we know that we cannot give her two minutes. But she had a really good moment where she attacked. It always takes some time to organise ourselves. In the end it was quite close, but I think the girls did an amazing job today to close the gap.”
By way of consolation, Markus was awarded the combativity prize as the day’s most daring rider. She smiled out to the fans gathered in the road as she stood on the podium, and was greeted with the loudest cheer of the day.
“It was really nice to be on the podium,” she said, “but I really hope I’ll come closer than I did today on some of the next stages.”
The script, next time, may have Markus in a starring role.
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