Going into stage 3 of La Vuelta Femenina, Mireia Benito (AG Insurance-Soudal) had not deliberate to spend greater than three hours on her personal on the entrance of the race. But when she got here off the primary descent of the day, she was alone and simply stored going, solely being caught by the peloton with 7.5km to go.
“The first difficult downhill was actually moist and slippery, and once I was down, it was simply myself. I assumed that possibly another person will be part of me after a number of kilometres, however sadly, I used to be alone the entire day, that made it a extremely robust stage,” Benito mentioned.
“But I gave all of it and actually wished to make it to the tip, or at the least so far as potential, so that is what I did.”
In the primary hour of the 130.2km stage, the Spanish time trial champion’s benefit wasn’t rather more than a minute, however finally it ballooned to over 5 minutes. Ticking off kilometre by kilometre, the 27-year-old was inspired by the roadside followers cheering her on.
“It was loopy. It was so good to listen to my identify. It was an enormous motivation for me, particularly once I was seeing children, younger children, screaming my identify. It was a brilliant feeling. I wished to cry, however in a great way. It stored my motivation actually excessive to maintain pushing till the tip,” she mentioned.
The 27-year-old Spanish rider would end effectively again within the lead group with the identical time as stage 3 winner Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease a Bike). For her breakaway effort, Benito was awarded the day’s combativity prize and can due to this fact put on the white combativity jersey on stage 4.
The 2024 Vuelta Femenina is the second version of the race that’s held in late April and early May underneath the re-branded identify, a part of a normal growth in Spanish girls’s biking. Benito is comfortable to encourage the youthful technology together with her instance.
“I believe that we’re making steps in the appropriate path, and I see that particularly with the younger children. You can see increasingly younger ladies coming to the buses and campers to say hello to us. It’s so, so candy to see the sunshine of their eyes once they have a look at you and they’re, ‘wow, you’re a skilled bicycle owner’.
“And it is so good to have the ability to discuss with them and to indicate them that this can be a potential technique to stay, that this can be a potential job for them to have. It’s nice that they’ll dream large and have folks like Mavi [García], like us, that they’ll deal with,” Benito defined.
The Vuelta Femenina is Benito’s first stage race of the highway season. She has one victory in 2024, an off-road race in Spain, Gravel Tres Cantos by Specialized.
