After a 106 km solo breakaway, climber Petra Stiasny won the most combative rider prize at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race. It was a well-deserved accolade for the 24-year-old who animated much of the day’s racing in Geelong.
Escape Collective caught up with Petra and team director Clark Sheehan after the race.
A long-standing tradition of the sport is the doomed solo breakaway. These vary in the extent to which they are doomed – the extent to which they are calculated to maximise screen-time for sponsors, the extent to which they are comical or brave and fruitful, or somewhere in between. But at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race today, there was a solo breakaway that was a redemption arc in itself, no matter the end result.
We should probably start by laying out some key players, and some statistics, here. The protagonist of the doomed solo breakaway: Swiss rider Petra Stiasny. She’s 24 years old, a pure climber – in the words of her Human Powered Health director Clark Sheehan, the “purest of the pure” – and has been a women’s WorldTour rider for five years, bouncing around from Roland to Fenix-Deceuninck and back again, before landing with Human Powered Health a few weeks ago. So how does a Swiss pure climber end up going solo in the breakaway on a day like this, a day that is always on the other side of the world to her, and often flat and hot and exposed? A valid question. An important one.
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Photos: GettySport
