Exactly. That definitely played a role today. A 3k climb with more than 100 km to go would never have such an impact in a mans race, like it was the case today. Just saying that talent is a bit more equally spread in the mens peloton.
For all the criticism of this, though, one of the problems is that there's so much depth in the Dutch squad that they could have submitted a team of "people that didn't make the squad" that would have been competitive - van Dijk, Wiebes, Wild, Riejanne Markus, Ensing, Rooijakkers, Stultiens, Koster - they could still have had a competitive team. And that the two strongest women in professional cycling right now are both Dutch. There are also a few top level riders who are always more or less alone when it comes to these big championship races, like Moolman-Pasio and Majerus, and I know you can argue "but Sagan is no different" in the men's races, but there isn't the same extent of difference between the haves and have nots in the men's péloton and Sagan can usually hop the train of one or other nation that isn't represented in a move and won't be expected to do so much pulling the work back on their own as we saw today where much of the péloton were happy for a long time to let the Poles try to pull back the move on their own because Niewiadoma was the highest profile rider to miss the move. The climbs weren't long enough to bring the likes of Hall or the Spanish riders into play, and a number of the riders who fell into the Sagan/Matthews mould who we thought the race best suited - Vos, Rivera, Brennauer, and so on - were never a factor because the péloton wasn't focused for a while and all of their teams had representation in the chase group. As we saw at the end, the péloton swallowed up the likes of Deignan and Cille, so they could well have got closer had there been more impetus in it, but really it was only very late on that the Germans committed to the chase after it seemed Koppenburg was the weakest of those up front, the Dutch did a spoiling job because of having their two big guns up front, and the chase group was very disunited.
For a long time they pegged Annemiek's lead, but you had a few problems for them that stopped it from getting across that gap.
Firstly, the isolated riders in the group would have looked to the Italians to do more of the work, as the Italians had the numbers advantage. However, Longo Borghini would need to win solo as she was the weakest sprinter of the group, and Paladin, great season though she's having, is hard to back in a H2H sprint against, say, Deignan. Plus, as we later found out, Soraya wasn't on a particularly good day either. So the Italians didn't really commit 100% to the chase. With the additional factor that if they DID, they would find it harder to respond to an Anna van der Breggen attack later.
Secondly, because the gap was generated so far from the finish, there were plenty of riders there who did not back themselves if they emptied the tank 100-70km from home, and were therefore not pulling 100% when they rolled through, in the hope that several riders pulling at 70% would pull back Annemiek going at 100%.
Thirdly, because Lizzie Deignan and, to a lesser extent Chloe Dygert, mostly Lizzie, showed themselves to be so strong when they were trying to push the group into pulling Annemiek back that it probably intimidated a lot of the riders in the group, that they would not want to go full gas until they had sufficiently tired Deignan out. When it turned out that, actually, Deignan wasn't quite as strong as she initially seemed, it was too late - the gap had been allowed to grow to an insurmountable size before Lizzie was finally left behind. I think there was a bit of - understandable - fear of Chloe Dygert as well - for a couple of reasons. Firstly that she had looked so strong early on, and secondly the fear of the unknown, as her being at the front end of a major race like this in Europe is a bit of a novelty. Her TT performance would have made people wary to an extent that they might not have been had they known that actually, 130km or so seemed to be about her threshold as she hit a wall then.
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